View Single Post
Old 13-06-07, 09:34 AM   #2
JackSpratts
 
JackSpratts's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default

New Presidential Debate Site? Clearly, YouTube
Katharine Q. Seelye

The quadrennial ritual of presidential debates has long followed a tried and true format.

A guy in a suit asks mostly predictable questions of other suits. The voter is a fixture in the audience, motionless until he or she gets to address the candidate, briefly and respectfully. Everything is choreographed.

Now imagine a kid in jeans and a T-shirt asking a question, less reverentially, more pointedly and using powerful visual images to underscore the point. Maybe he or she will ask about the war in Iraq — and show clips from a soldier’s funeral. Or a mushroom cloud. If global warming is the issue, the videographer might photoshop himself or herself onto a melting glacier. The question might come in the form of a rap song or through spliced images of a candidate’s contradictory statements.

The presidential debates are about to enter the world of YouTube, the anything-goes home-video-sharing Web site that puts the power in the hands of the camera holder. YouTube, which is owned by Google, and CNN are co-sponsoring a debate among the eight Democratic presidential candidates on July 23 in South Carolina, an event that could define the next phase of what has already been called the YouTube election, a visual realm beyond Web sites and blogs.

The candidates are to assemble on a stage in Charleston, S.C., at the Citadel (yes, the Citadel, the military school criticized by some Democrats a decade ago before it began admitting women). The questions will come via video submitted by ordinary people through YouTube. Moderating between the viewer and the candidates will be Anderson Cooper, the CNN anchor.

The video format opens the door for originality and spontaneity — elements usually foreign to the controlled environment of presidential image-making. Because visual images can be more powerful than words, the videos have the potential to elicit emotional responses from the candidates and frame the election in new ways.

“It’s one of the biggest innovations we’ve seen in politics,” said Mike Gehrke, director of research for the Democratic National Committee, which has sanctioned the YouTube/CNN event as the first of six official Democratic debates this year (which means the party has coordinated them).

User-generated video, he said, is changing the balance in campaigns. “It used to be a one-way street,” he said. “It would cost a lot of money for a campaign to put together a good TV ad, then you had to buy time, put it on the air and later on Web sites. Now it goes the other way too, and you have people talking to each other and to the campaigns.”

Just ask former Senator George Allen from Virginia, the Republican who lost his bid for re-election last year after an amateur video circulated all over the Web and broke through to the mainstream media showing him using the word “macaca” to describe a Democratic campaign worker of Indian descent.

On CNN, Mr. Cooper’s signature style is personal and informal, but the selection of him as moderator, as opposed to someone less established or more associated with the Web, suggests that the event will retain a mainstream air. CNN and YouTube are to release details soon on how they will choose the videos and other parameters.

Mr. Cooper has already made an appeal on CNN to viewers to be “creative” in their videos. No one knows quite what to expect.

The videos are likely to reflect the irreverence inherent on YouTube. But how far will CNN go in airing the site's often-subversive attitude, like the "1984" video portraying Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as Big Sister? If the videos shown are too bland, there could be a revolt on YouTube, where users are likely to post their videos anyway, whether they make it on the air or not.

More than 100 million video clips are viewed every day on YouTube. Andrew Rasiej, a co-founder of the nonpartisan Web site techPresident.com, which tracks the candidates’ use of technology and how much, or little, they are achieving online, said Internet video was changing the political landscape.

“We’re moving to a society that is video-based from one that is text-based, whether we like it or not,” he said. “Candidates are starting to recognize that the only way to fight the potential of the tsunami of voter-generated video is to produce lots of video themselves,” he said. “The Internet culture recognizes that Internet video is more authentic, more granular, less scripted than television, and it is an antidote to sound-bite politics.”

Michael Bassik, a Democratic consultant with MSHC Partners, who specializes in online political advertising and is not affiliated with any campaign, noted that YouTube offers an “exponentially greater opportunity to reach a young, active, passionate audience,” one that is far bigger than the combined audiences of the nightly newscasts and the five debates that have been shown on television so far this season. For those five debates, the majority of viewers were older than 55.

“The impact of the YouTube debate can’t be over-estimated,” Mr. Bassik said.

The political videos on YouTube, especially those offered by the campaigns themselves, are almost always less popular than random clips. The most popular video of all time, which has been up on YouTube for a year, is one about the evolution of dance, viewed more than 50 million times. One of the most-watched political videos, the "1984" anti-Clinton clip, which has been up for three months, has been watched about 3.4 million times.

But the ones on the debate may get more attention.

The footage will be available on the Web for anyone to mash up and create new videos. Through the viral nature of the Web, highlights from the debate are likely to get deep penetration in cyberspace. And videos being aired during this debate will likely magnify the audience because some of them will be picked up, linked to, replayed and commented upon by the mainstream media. (The debate will also be simulcast on CNN en Español.)

Mr. Bassik said one downside for the candidates would be if a negative video about them were tagged to show up when someone searches for a campaign’s own video. But, he said, “the campaigns are so risk-averse, they would be reluctant to engage in a YouTube debate if it weren’t perceived over all as a positive experience.”

Most of the presidential campaigns are now fully engaged with video. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the Democratic candidate whose campaign is perceived as being more advanced than most in using the Internet, views the YouTube debate as a chance to “extend the online dialogue,” his spokesman, Bill Burton, said.

The effect of video in a debate, Mr. Burton said, would be “like when the ‘talkies’ married the moving image with sound in the 1920s.”

Matt Lewis, director of operations at townhall.com, a large online source of conservative news and views, said he would recommend that the Republicans participate in a YouTube debate.

“Yes, there’s definitely opportunities for abuse here, for things to be shown out of context,” Mr. Lewis said. “But then you come back with your own video and show the full thing. Technology will happen, and the question is whether it will happen for you or to you.”

The huge popularity of YouTube is likely to translate into big ratings for the debate on CNN. So far, the 2.8 million people who tuned into the Democratic debate in New Hampshire on June 3 made up the highest number of people to have watched any of the five televised debates.

Whether the YouTube debate translates into a bigger turnout by the under-30 crowd at the polls next November is a different question.

In the last presidential election in 2004, about 49 percent of people aged 18 to 29 voted, according to Michael McDonald, an associate professor of government at George Mason University and an expert in voter statistics. That was up from the 40 percent of the under-30s who voted in 2000, but it was lower than the population at large. (In 2004, a relatively high 63.8 percent of all citizens over 18 voted, according to a survey by the United States Census Bureau. That was up from 59.5 percent in 2000.)

Still, Mr. McDonald noted, the under-30 crowd is accounting for an increasing share of the electorate — 16 percent in 2004, he said, up from 14 percent in 2000. (The Boston Globe recently examined the growing interest of young people in voting. The Times's Janet Elder wrote an analysis of the voting patterns of 18-24 year olds today.)

Mr. McDonald said he expected a high turnout in 2008 among both voters over all and younger voters because they are often motivated to the polls by big issues like war.

In trying to reach them, the candidates may be moved to do unusual things. Perhaps some will show up at the YouTube debate in something other than a dark suit. Some may even bring their own videos.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/us...outube.html?hp





Milestones

TV's 'Mr. Wizard' Don Herbert Dies at 89
Lynn Elber

Don Herbert, who as television's "Mr. Wizard" introduced generations of young viewers to the joys of science, died Tuesday. He was 89. Herbert, who had bone cancer, died at his suburban Bell Canyon home, said his son-in-law, Tom Nikosey.

"He really taught kids how to use the thinking skills of a scientist," said former colleague Steve Jacobs. He worked with Herbert on a 1980s show that echoed the original 1950s "Watch Mr. Wizard" series, which became a fond baby boomer memory.

In "Watch Mr. Wizard," which was produced from 1951 to 1964 and received a Peabody Award in 1954, Herbert turned TV into an entertaining classroom. On a simple, workshop-like set, he demonstrated experiments using household items.

"He modeled how to predict and measure and analyze. ... The show today might seem slow but it was in-depth and forced you to think along," Jacobs said. "You were learning about the forces of nature."

Herbert encouraged children to duplicate experiments at home, said Jacobs, who recounted serving as a behind-the-scenes "science sidekick" to Herbert on the '80s "Mr. Wizard's World" that aired on the Nickelodeon channel.

When Jacobs would reach for beakers and flasks, Herbert would remind him that science didn't require special tools.

"'You could use a mayonnaise jar for that,'" Jacobs recalled being chided by Herbert. "He tried to bust the image of scientists and that science wasn't just for special people and places."

Herbert's place in TV history was acknowledged by later stars. When "Late Night with David Letterman" debuted in 1982, Herbert was among the first-night guests.

Born in Waconia, Minn., Herbert was a 1940 graduate of LaCrosse State Teachers College and served as a U.S. Army Air Corps pilot during World War II. He worked as an actor, model and radio writer before starting "Watch Mr. Wizard" in Chicago on NBC.

The show moved to New York after several years.

He is survived by six children and stepchildren and by his second wife, Norma, his son-in-law said. A private funeral service was planned.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/tv/140...t_Herbert.html





Felice Frankel: Photographing the Beauty of Science
Cornelia Dean

When people call Felice Frankel an artist, she winces. In the first place, the photographs she makes don't sell. She knows this, she says, because after she received a Guggenheim grant in 1995, she started taking her work to galleries. "Nobody wanted to bother looking," she said.

In the second place, her images are not full of emotion or ideology or any other kind of message. As she says, "My stuff is about phenomena."

Phenomena like magnetism or the behavior of water molecules or how colonies of bacteria grow - phenomena of nature. "So I don't call it art," Frankel said. "When it's art, it's more about the creator, not necessarily the concept in the image."

As first an artist in residence and now a research scientist at MIT, and now also a senior research fellow at the Institute for Innovative Computing at Harvard, she helps researchers use cameras, microscopes and other tools to display the beauty of science.

With her help, scientists have turned dull images of things like yeast in a dish or the surface of a CD into photographs so striking that they appear often on covers of scientific journals and magazines.

According to George Whitesides, a Harvard chemist and her longtime collaborator, "She has transformed the visual face of science."

One of her photographs, a vivid image of an iron-rich fluid under the influence of magnets, has been so widely reproduced that she is "sick of it," Frankel said.

Her crucial step in making it was typical. She slipped a yellow Post-It note under the slide holding the fluid. In her view, the move did not materially alter the laboratory conditions, but it snapped the image of the fluid into such arresting focus that the National Science Foundation made a poster out of it.

In her book, "Envisioning Science" (MIT Press, 2002), Frankel instructed researchers, in words and many pictures, in the kind of visual depiction of scientific processes and subjects she and Whitesides produced in an earlier book, "On the Surface of Things," (Harvard University Press, 1997). Now they are finishing a book about "small things," as Whitesides put it, things at the limit of what can be seen with light, even through the microscope.

Meanwhile, Frankel has been organizing conferences around the country on "Image and Meaning," and working to establish a program sponsored by the National Science Foundation on the uses of visual imagery in teaching science.

With colleagues, she is working to set up an online site where researchers can talk across disciplines about the concepts they want to convey in images.

But she does not feel that her photographs have to explain everything. "To me, the idea is to engage somebody to look at something, and they don't even know it's science," she said. "People are not intimidated by pictures. It permits them to ask questions."

To achieve this goal, she sometimes alters the images. For example, when she photographed bacteria growing on agar, "the agar was cracking," she said. "But I wanted the reader to pay attention to the bacteria pattern. So I digitally deleted the cracks."

Another time, she photographed rod-shaped orange bacteria, and her film was somehow unable to reproduce the orange she could see when she looked through the microscope. "I added it," she recalled.

These practices are acceptable, she said, because their purpose is not to disguise or twist scientific information, but to make it clearer. And when images like this appear in scientific journals, Whitesides said, the "untinkered original" is posted online with supplementary material.

For Frankel, the main point is that "I always tell the reader what I do when I manipulate an image." And she negotiates with her research colleagues about how far she can go.

"I think this should be part of every scientist's education, the manipulation and enhancement of images," Frankel said. "To just have a blanket statement - 'You cannot do anything to your image' - that does not make sense.

"You can get a little crazy with objectivity. If enhancing your image gets you to see something better," it's acceptable, she said, "as long as we indicate what we are doing."

That's what publications like Scientific American do when they use her work - they inform readers that the image in question has been altered, and how, said Mariette DiChristina, its executive editor.

But journal editors often have another issue with her. As DiChristina put it, if she gets a suggestion she does not like, "she has been known to balk forcefully."

In the end, Whitesides said, "what comes out of it is a result one can be very happy with."

For Frankel, 62, this work is a return to a major interest of her youth, when she studied science and aspired to a career as a chemist.

Born Felice Oringel in Brooklyn, New York, she attended Midwood High School and Brooklyn College, where she majored in biology. After graduation, she worked in a cancer research lab at Columbia University. "Science has always been in my soul," she said.

But life intervened. She married Kenneth Frankel. He was sent to Vietnam. When he returned, they moved to western Massachusetts, where he worked as a chest surgeon and they raised two sons.

When Frankel returned from Vietnam, he brought a gift. "It was a very good camera," Frankel said. "And that's not trivial, that it was good."

She started taking photographs. "Probably I was good," she said, but because the camera was good, too.

"Technically, it worked," she said. "So I was reinforced to continue taking pictures," first as a volunteer at a public television station and then for an architect.

"I had a knack for it," she said. "I didn't like taking pictures of people that much, because you are too dependent on them to make a good picture. With architecture, you have to rely on your own sense of composition."

Soon she began landscape photography, producing magazine photographs and, eventually, a book, "Modern Landscape Architecture: Redefining the Garden" (Abbeville Press, 1991). Then she landed a dream assignment, to travel the country photographing landscapes. It was a disaster.

"They wanted the Technicolor blue sky, the hot pinks, which was not what landscape was to me," she said. "I took pictures of rain so you could see the sensuality of the design."

She realized that she was, as she put it, "in the wrong spot," and applied for a Loeb fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she spent the academic year of 1991-2 sitting in on university courses. "I lived at the Science Center, because I was hungry to get back into science," she said.

One day, someone recommended a course in molecular biology, "and the fellow presenting the work was a terrific lecturer and very obviously visual in the way he presented the work," she said. She introduced herself, and he invited her to his lab.

The professor was Whitesides. "We started talking about how one represented science on the blackboard," he recalled, "and at some point she made the remark that she thought we did it badly and I said, 'Well, you show us how to do it better,' and we were off and running."

One of the first photographs she made in his lab, water droplets arrayed on a slide with a water-repellent grid, ended up on the cover of the journal Science.

Since then, Whitesides said, "her impact on scientific communication has been very large, in the way science talks to science and science talks to the world outside science."

Beyond that, he added: "She has a wonderful sense of design and color. It is hard to say she is not an artist."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/...ce/snphoto.php





Could Boy Archaeologist Be Next Harry Potter?

The publisher who first signed up J.K. Rowling believes he may have found another Harry Potter -- but this time it is a boy archaeologist.

In an industry that revels in hype and is always on the lookout for the next blockbuster, two unknown authors have amassed advances of over 500,000 pounds and pre-publication rights in 15 languages.

Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams were signed by Chicken House publisher Barry Cunningham after he tracked down an early version of their book "Tunnels" that was self-published.

"I knew from page one that Harry Potter was magic. Reading 'Tunnels' gave me the same thrill," said Cunningham, who has also achieved worldwide publishing success with the children's books of German writer Cornelia Funke.

"Tunnels has it all: a boy archaeologist, merciless villains, a lost world and an extraordinary journey to the centre of the earth," Cunningham said after first stirring up interest at the international children's rights fair in Bologna.

The authors originally met at university but then went on to follow very different careers -- one as an investment banker, the other as an artist.

They got together when Gordon was made redundant from his job in corporate finance. He then sold his house to self-publish a limited run edition of "Tunnels."

Cunningham, hearing of their success, signed the pair up for a series of fantasy tales seen through the eyes of 14-year-old Will Burrows and set in a hidden world deep below London.

When working with British publisher Bloomsbury, Cunningham transformed the publishing industry in the mid 1990s when he signed J.K. Rowling, whose Potter sagas have now sold more than 325 million copies worldwide and made her the world's first billion dollar author.

Pottermania is set to scale new heights in July with the last novel in her Potter saga hitting the bookstands and the latest film being launched in a deluge of global publicity.

When signing up Rowling, Cunningham famously did warn the struggling young writer who was a single mother at the time that she was unlikely to make any money from her tale of a teenage wizard.

Rowling has admitted "If it wasn't for Barry Cunningham, Harry Potter might still be languishing in his cupboard under the stairs."
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...71519720070612





Junior Sleuth Finds Her Way to the Screen, With Knee-Socks Pulled Up High
A. O. SCOTT

In “Nancy Drew,” the titular girl sleuth, a literary role model and crush object for generations of young readers, is decked out with air quotes and the full complement of knowing pop-culture accessories. At one point in the film a Southern California real estate agent appraises Nancy’s penny-loafer-and-knee-socks look and says, “With a little tweaking, you could be adorable.” Later a semi-reformed Mean Girl from Nancy’s school notes that Nancy’s retro appearance has become a fashion sensation called “the new sincerity.”

As far as I’m concerned, the old sincerity worked just fine, and too much tweaking has been done with the intention of bringing the girl sleuth up to date. The disappointment of “Nancy Drew,” which was directed by Andrew Fleming and written by Mr. Fleming and Tiffany Paulsen, is that it trusts neither its heroine nor its audience enough to approach its material with the confidence and conviction that Carolyn Keene, the pseudonymous author of the Nancy Drew books, brought to the franchise.

The movie turns Nancy, played with more pluck than brilliance by Emma Roberts, into an uptight goody-two-shoes, a prig who lectures her school principal on matters of policy and who won’t exceed the speed limit in the middle of a car chase. Worse, “Nancy Drew” corrupts the clean, functional, grown-up style of the books with the kind of cute, pseudo-smart self-consciousness that has sadly become the default setting for contemporary juvenile popular culture produced by insecure, immature adults.

Nancy and her father (Tate Donovan) move from River Heights, a hackneyed Hollywood image of an American small town, to an equally hackneyed Hollywood image of, um, Hollywood. There, the girls are vapid mini-fashionistas who wrinkle their noses at Nancy’s heartland earnestness and conspire to steal her cupcakes at lunch. Some people have tattoos. Back home there was a German housekeeper in a starched uniform, a population that dresses from the 1958 L. L. Bean catalog and a clean-cut boy named Ned (Max Thieriot), who hung around waiting for Nancy to notice that he’s madly in love with her.

In time Ned shows up in Los Angeles, where he must compete for Nancy’s attention with Corky (Josh Flitter), kid brother to one of the Mean Girls and perhaps the most annoying annoying-sidekick character in a movie since Robin Williams’s last cartoon voice-over.

Corky’s wisecracking distracts from what should be the movie’s main concern, namely the solving of a mystery. The great appeal of the Nancy Drew books (the first was published in 1930), as of any mystery-novel series, lies not in the static, predictable characters but in the intricate, well-carpentered plots. What keeps the readers’ eyes on the page is the chance to look over the detective’s shoulder as she puzzles over clues, and to feel the tingle of apprehension when her sleuthing begins to get her in trouble.

The greatest failure of “Nancy Drew” is that it denies viewers these pleasures, sacrificing the sturdy mechanics of a decent thriller in order to pursue tired jokes and second-hand atmospherics. At first the set-up seems promising. Nancy and her dad move into a crumbling bungalow once owned by a movie star whose death 25 years earlier has never been explained. Her fate gives the movie some intriguing intimations of Hollywood kiddie-noir. But this is not a child’s-portion “Chinatown,” or even a PG “Black Dahlia.” Instead the mystery has all the suspense and intrigue of a less-than-groovy episode of “Scooby-Doo.”

I wish it were otherwise. And maybe, if this movie spawns sequels, it will be. Ms. Roberts is certainly energetic and likable, and the character might regain her wide and durable appeal in spite of the obnoxious way she is written here. But as it is, “Nancy Drew” stands as an example of how to take a foolproof, time-tested formula — a young detective using smarts and determination to solve a case — and mess it up with superficial cleverness and pandering hackwork. How this happened is hardly a mystery; botched adaptations are as common as BlackBerries in Hollywood. But it is nonetheless something of a crime.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/15/mo...nanc.html?8dpc





The Former Queen of Buzz Conjures a Golden Heyday
Michael Kimmelman

Tina Brown, the once highly conspicuous editor of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and the short-lived Talk, has just written “The Diana Chronicles,” about the British princess who, like her, reigned as a golden girl over the transatlantic media world during the 1980s and ’90s.

“I felt the book had to hit a standard or I’d regret it,” Ms. Brown said over lunch the other day at the Beacon restaurant in Midtown. “It had to have some endurance, to enable me to make a quantum leap, to take me into a different area.”

And into the new century, which frankly hasn’t been so great for Ms. Brown’s career. Talk tanked. “Topic A With Tina Brown,” her little-seen show on CNBC, was canceled. For a time she wrote a column for The Washington Post. She contemplated a book about hubris, of all things. Now “The Diana Chronicles” (Doubleday), pegged to the 10th anniversary in August of the deadly car crash in Paris, is Ms. Brown’s latest attempt to reinvent herself and seize the limelight.

At lunch she seemed a little nervous about that. She bristled at the idea that the book might be perceived as “just a gambit for reinvention rather than the passionate literary exercise that it was.” Life, she said “is a process of reinvention, of moving on.” She is returning with pleasure to her “roots as a writer,” she added.

She is, as she knows, an easy target. The culture of celebrity, over which she presided for years, has neither scruples nor sentiment, and a new book by her is an invitation for detractors to gloat over the passing of her time. So far the reviews have been positive.

Trim, blond, doe-eyed, like her subject, she wore at lunch a smart black T-shirt and skirt, not quite the taffeta “drop-dead black décolleté number,” as she describes it in the book, that Diana, formerly the demure virgin, snatched off the rack from a London designer’s studio in 1981 and wore on her first public date with Prince Charles. (“Wasn’t that a mighty feast to set before a king?” Lady Diana Cooper said about the “sudden revelation of cleavage.”)

Comparing author with subject is inevitable, and not only thanks to the Di-like photo of the attractive 53-year-old Ms. Brown on the book’s back cover. She writes about a mix of monarchy, aristocracy and media: “a revisiting and valedictory of that whole world, which included my own early immersion in the London media,” she said. Princess Diana brought star power to British royalty, as Ms. Brown would also do within the more circumscribed but likewise clubby sphere of American editing.

The daughter of a British film producer and of Laurence Olivier’s former assistant, Ms. Brown arrived in New York in 1984 from London to save Vanity Fair. She had just resuscitated Tatler, the dowager magazine for the upper classes, whose transformation into something more broadly stylish and socially indispensable was linked with the princess’s public ascension.

“I felt an immediate bond with the Diana story,” she said. “Diana emerged blinking into the ’80s just when I took over the Tatler. Tatler had started as the 18th-century coffeehouse magazine of Swift, and it got more and more staid, rather as The New Yorker did after Harold Ross,” its fouding editor.

“I’d already done a lot of stories about society before I got to Tatler. And I’d grown up in a showbiz background, the bookish daughter in the household. So I got it.”

By “it,” she meant the dawning media and celebrity culture in Britain. She remembers attending “the definitive end-of-decade social events of the ’70s,” a 40th-birthday costume party for Nicky Haslam, the decorator, who dressed for the occasion in white silk like an Indian rajah, greeting guests like Cecil Beaton, Mick Jagger, Joan Collins and Camilla Parker Bowles’s brother, Mark Shand.

“There was a carnival of influences at that party,” Ms. Brown recalled, “and it crystallized the fact that society was no longer homogeneous. It was, I thought, what Tatler magazine should be.”

Eyeing high society now meant navel gazing too for the media mob that also joined in on the new aristocracy of celebrity. “The third story I did on Diana was about how she was being covered in the media. We saw something was happening that was as interesting as Di herself.”

What was happening, thanks to Diana’s media-exploiting instincts and looks, was the creation of the mythology of the People’s Princess. Years later at The New Yorker, Ms. Brown helped replace that mythology with a new mythology of grief. She recalls being awakened at 5 a.m. that August morning by a phone call from CNN. Within hours she conceived a Diana memorial issue and oversaw its publication three days later. Clive James, Salman Rushdie and Simon Schama wrote for it. On the cover a drawing showed a palace guard shedding a tear.

She exempts that issue of her New Yorker from the media frenzy, about which she’s critical in the book. “The death became a festival of inclusion,” Ms. Brown said. “It was the first great griefathon. Since then it’s become common — the pope, Terri Schiavo. I think a magazine has to mirror its times. The fever of a moment has to be captured. That Diana memorial cover was very effective. I still think it’s a very good issue.”

She added: “I’m not the sort of person who would have bought a Diana book, but I read all the articles. I’m writing this book for people who read the books but also for people like me.”

Some people, of course, loved what she did with The New Yorker; others hated it. But the magazine became impossible to ignore. She chafes now at the suggestion that she blew the institution up so that her successor could put it back together after she left. “We let go 79 people and hired 68,” she responded. “It was a total blood transfusion. To me the biggest problem for The New Yorker was how to get people to open something that looks like a safari in print. The idea was always to provide a story that they would read.

“The sweet and the low, the long and the short, it’s somewhat what Harold Ross did. His New Yorker was very topical. I related less to Shawn’s New Yorker than to Ross’s.” William Shawn, Ross’s successor, ran the magazine from 1952 to 1987.

When, to the surprise of everyone including S. I. Newhouse Jr., chairman of Condé Nast, owner of The New Yorker, she quit the magazine in 1998 to start Talk, she had become such a public figure and media magnet that her resignation was front-page news in The New York Times. With Talk, and its book and movie divisions, she began a doomed partnership with Miramax, whose co-founder, Harvey Weinstein, also now happens to be in the process of reinventing himself. Talk’s christening bash on Liberty Island was the late ’90s version of Mr. Haslam’s end-of-the-’70s affair.

Then Talk fizzled. Was she wrong to have left The New Yorker?

“Oh yes, it was a big mistake,” said Ms. Brown, who has for years lived on the East Side with her husband, Harold Evans. (They have two children.) Like Diana, she recognizes candor as a form of self-defense. “I believe we put out a good magazine,” Ms. Brown continued, “It was that dot-com moment. I drank the Kool-Aid. I loved my idea of combining Paris Match and The New Yorker. And I loved that glossy paper we used. But it had to be a weekly, not a monthly. And advertisers had to be brought around. The time wasn’t there because the money wasn’t there.”

Talk editors soon found new jobs at The Times and elsewhere. Ms. Brown began her stint at CNBC. “I got much better at it,” she said about the buzz-based show that exploited her dense Rolodex but never found the magic she showed before. “I liked everything except being on the air. And CNBC is a business channel. It was put on a Sunday night after a day of infomercials. Then again, I was a television novice.”

The Washington Post column kept her before the public. Meanwhile her hubris book was going to feature boldface crash-and-burn cases like Gerald Levin and Martha Stewart. “We’re living in an era of hubris,” Ms. Brown explained. “In the Bush era it’s all about overreach. But in the end I didn’t want to write a book on a notional subject. It wasn’t engaging me enough.”

So she turned to writing this book about a celebrity whose iconic glamour harks back to a period that was also Ms. Brown’s heyday, not so long ago, but somehow far away. Di, who never shaved her head, went to jail or took off her underpants in public, has been replaced by Britney, Paris and Lindsay. The panache, gloss, savvy and grace that Ms. Brown tried to bring to highbrow celebrity journalism has been marginalized too, by a growing avalanche of more tabloidlike coverage.

“The temperature has shifted,” Ms. Brown declared. “Now everybody’s famous and nobody’s interesting. Any celebrity will do.” Tabloids have become “fabloids,” she said. And bloggers are watching. With the Web, “you worry about saying something to somebody in Germany and finding it reverberate around the world. Now you’re supposed to love any publicity just because it’s great buzz and not mind whether it’s fair or true, says the erstwhile queen of buzz,” said the erstwhile queen herself.

“Yes,” she added, answering a question not asked, “it’s nicer to be on the other side.”

Was it also true, by the way, that she recently expressed her interest in the job of managing editor at Time? The post went to Richard Stengel. “I think I could have done a good job with that,” she replied. “It has great DNA.”

But it’s not a good time to start up new magazines, she said. Editors today “are a dying breed,” she added. “It’s all not about the content. In TV it’s only about logistics, ratings. It’s a very depressing moment in letters.

“Writing a book is one of the last chances to do what you want.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/books/11tina.html





A Publishing Quandary: Do Excerpts Help Sales?
Joanne Kaufman

When the July issue of Vanity Fair hits newsstands tomorrow, those hungry for news and gossip about the British royal family may find sustenance in the magazine’s excerpt from “The Diana Chronicles,” Tina Brown’s evocation of the life and times of the Princess of Wales.

But will the 8,200-word excerpt prove the literary equivalent of an amuse-bouche, something to tide eager readers over until they can get their hands on the book, which comes out the same day? Or will those who plow through the article feel as if they have had their fill?

“The goal of any excerpt is to engage readers, to suggest that here is a book that will interest them,” said Paul Bogaards, executive director of publicity for the Knopf Publishing Group. “But the key is not to sate them with the material. You want the hunger and thirst to still be there.”

Although excerpts from high-profile books routinely appear in national magazines, some publishers have been having second thoughts about the strategy. Frequently, an excerpt can offer a lift to a book’s sales, but there is always the risk that it might offer too much, thus stealing thunder (and revenue) from the book.

Alison Rich, the director of publicity at Doubleday, publisher of “The Diana Chronicles,” said she had no such concerns. “Tina’s writing is extraordinary,” Ms. Rich said. “The book is an incredibly rich textured portrait of Diana and all the royals, and it’s our belief that readers will be anxious for more.”

Even so, among publishers, “I see more and more of them interested in the TV interview for their author rather than the book excerpt because TV has a greater reach than magazines,” said Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of Publishers Weekly.

Magazine editors who five years ago would have reflexively bid for first serial rights to certain high-profile books are now exploring their options, choosing instead to run a feature about the book or an interview with the author. Some magazines — Time and Harper’s in particular — have turned to asking authors to write an article or essay that touches on issues raised in their book.

“I think the whole model needs to be rethought,” said Richard Stengel, the managing editor of Time. “I’m less interested in buying headlines than a great reader experience.”

Because the excerpt is just one weapon in the publicity arsenal, publishers are hard-put to assess its role in the campaign. Still, they can point to recent successes like “It Ain’t All About the Cookin’ ” by the restaurateur and Food Network host Paula Deen, which was serialized in Ladies’ Home Journal and hit the New York Times best-seller list immediately after publication.

On the other hand, Time magazine’s excerpt of “I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story,” by Rick Bragg, put a dent in book sales, according to Mr. Bogaards of Knopf. “The excerpt gave away too much — I think people felt they’d had their fill,” he said. “We sold 175,000 in hardcover but had expected to do twice that.”

The trick, publishers say, is to know just what they have got between those hardcovers. When leading administration figures or particular celebrities sign a contract to tell their stories, there is bound to be a conversation about selling first serial rights, the term used for an excerpt that appears in advance of a book’s publication.

But if such books “have just one revelation, one major thing that everyone has been waiting to hear, and they read it in an excerpt they’re going to think, ‘That’s enough. I don’t need to buy the book,’ ” said Kristine Dahl, a literary agent at International Creative Management.

For publishers, the problems include fewer magazines that run excerpts, and smaller sums available to pay for them. “There used to be The Saturday Evening Post, Look and Life, and it was big money,” said Lynn Nesbit, a literary agent.

In those palmy days, it was not unheard-of for $100,000 to change hands in excerpt deals, according to Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House.

But the interests of book publishers and magazine editors do not tend to dovetail. “What often happens with excerpts is that magazines pick the best stuff or they weave together an excerpt that uses pieces from all over the book so readers get the whole pruned story,” said Ms. Nelson of Publishers Weekly. “It’s great for the magazine but probably not great for sales of the book.”

To protect themselves while extracting maximum benefit, publishers may limit the size and scope of the excerpt and forbid cherry-picking. The publisher may also demand that the excerpt be kept off the magazine’s Web site to limit leaks, and require that the excerpt be heralded in a cover line.

Because big money is no longer on the table, it is not terribly painful for the publisher to walk away if the parties can’t come to terms, publishing executives said. “For $1,500, why risk exposure of all the juicy bits if it’s going to hurt sales?” said Ellen Archer, the publisher of Hyperion.

Some publishers are looking instead to place excerpts on the Internet. “Amazon.com has expressed interest in first serializations,” Mr. Bogaards of Knopf said. “There isn’t a silver bullet that delivers 10 million readers. This is just one way to bring awareness to your book and create interest from other media outlets.”

According to Mr. Bogaards, the well-chosen slice of a book in the appropriate magazine provides the framework for the initial publicity campaign. A cover in Time or Newsweek suggests weight and importance, perhaps a national dialogue; Vanity Fair, a certain fizz; Ladies’ Home Journal or Good Housekeeping, issues of importance to women.

The New Yorker? Well, it’s not as sought-after for excerpts as one might imagine. “Everyone thinks it’s lovely to have an excerpt there,” said Ms. Dahl of International Creative Management, but since there’s no special designation in the magazine, “it’s hard for readers to know it’s from an upcoming book.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/bu...11excerpt.html





Google to Digitize Big Ten School Books
AP

Twelve major universities will digitize select collections in each of their libraries -- up to 10 million volumes -- as part of Google Inc.'s book-scanning project. The goal: a shared digital repository that faculty, students and the public can access quickly.

The partnership involves the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, which includes the University of Chicago and the 11 universities in the Big Ten athletic conference (yes, there are 11): Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue and Wisconsin.

"We have a collective ambition to share resources and work together to preserve the world's printed treasures," said Northwestern Provost Lawrence Dumas.

The committee said Google will scan and index materials "in a manner consistent with copyright law." Google generally makes available the full text of books in the public domain and limited portions of copyrighted books.

Several other universities, including Harvard and California, already have signed up to let Google scan their libraries.

But Google still faces a lawsuit by the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild over its plans to incorporate parts of copyrighted books.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/interne....ap/index.html





Printing Books Online: an Author You Can't Refuse
Robert MacMillan

Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller are among the world's most respected authors, but for a while they had a hard time finding a publisher.

Rather than seek a mainstream outlet for racy novels such as "The Black Book" and "Tropic of Cancer," they used the Obelisk Press, a French publishing house started by Jack Kahane to print his own novel.

That was the 1930s. Now, a young Henry Miller could use new Internet companies like Blurb.com, i-Universe, Lulu.com or Xlibris to print his book -- and even sell it through their online stores.

Gwen Fuller used Blurb (www.blurb.com) to publish her book, "Do Mallet the Suitcase," a collection of spam e-mail arranged as haiku.

Among them: "Dude, get all U need/And dragonhead by reckon/She will love you more," and "Just what all men need/C'Mon Baby, Light My Fire/Chat and meet women."

Avoiding traditional publishing was a plus for Fuller, 48, a life coach in Menlo Park, California.

"There was a process that I was sort of unwilling to get engaged in when there was something that could so immediately deliver a quality book," she said.

Blurb requires customers to download its software, which then lets them lay out text and photos. Then they send the specifications to the company, which prints the books in either hardcover or soft.

Rates start at $18.95 for one small softcover. Bulk-order discounts start at 10 copies, company founder Eileen Gittins said.

"If you order 10 copies, you get a 10 percent discount, 100 copies you get a 15 percent discount," she said. "Over 200, we encourage you to give us a shout."

Blurb also allows authors to sell their works on its in-house bookstore, printing copies as new orders come in, and to charge a markup so they can make a profit. The company sends out a check every time an author earns $25 or more.

"People Who Love To Write"

Many people use Blurb for personal projects as well. Michelle Flaherty and her husband Peter received a book made by their daughters with photos of Haunted Acre Woods, the large-scale Halloween display they mount each year at their home in East Falmouth, Massachusetts.

"It was the first Christmas gift in I don't know how many years that actually made me cry," she said. "It was so original, so different."

While a budding novelist could use Blurb, the company specializes in photo layouts with glossy paper and the look of a "coffee-table" book.

Some writers looking to print more literary works are visiting Lulu (www.lulu.com).

Lulu, founded by Bob Young, co-founder of software company Red Hat Inc., allows customers to publish school yearbooks, artwork, calendars and many other things -- but especially books. Lulu recoups expenses and takes a 20 percent cut of the profit on a book sale.

Mark Wilkerson's biography of Who guitarist and writer Pete Townshend has led him to the brink of a deal with a conventional publisher in Europe.

Wilkerson, 37, is an aircraft maintenance planner for UPS, and lives in Prospect, Kentucky -- about as far away from the mainstream publishing world as it gets.

Publishers that he pitched rejected him or asked him why he was qualified to write his book, the 618-page "Amazing Journey: The Life of Pete Townshend."

"Lulu has been fabulous for me, because what else would I have done?" he said. "I was completely ignorant of the many facets of the publishing industry."

Wilkerson sent his book to reviewers, and received positive notices in The Rocky Mountain News, the Chicago Sun-Times and influential music magazine MOJO. The book came to Townshend's attention, and the legendary musician tentatively committed to writing a foreword to the next edition, Wilkerson said.

Blurb and Lulu are not the only self-publishing options on the Internet. Xlibris (www.xlibris.com) is a self-publishing company that works in a partnership with Random House's investment unit, and iUniverse (www.iuniverse.com) offers similar services.

Both offer more services, with packages from about $300 all the way up to nearly $13,000.

Blurb and Lulu are better for enthusiasts, said Scott Flora, executive director of the Small Publishers Association of North America,

"If there are people who love to write and they want to see their book in print, this is a good option," he said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...34503020070609





To Sell Pictures, They Chase News 24-7
Marti Maguire

Carter Rabil's Chevy Suburban resounds with a ragged opera of dispatchers.

His multiple radio scanners monitor police, EMS and fire departments from Raleigh to the coast. He listens to the crackle of routine codes, waiting for that one longed-for soprano -- the urgent voice reporting a shooting, a crash, an officer in trouble.

When he hears it, Rabil gives chase, armed with his still and video cameras, seeking the scene and the image.

Rabil, 52, isn't on the staff of a news organization. Based in Smithfield, he scrambles for news pictures and hopes some newspaper or TV station will buy them.

It's an unusual job, but not a unique one. On the western side of the Triangle, Durham freelancer Julian Harrison also rushes to the scene, cameras in tow, when there's trouble.

They scramble so fast they have arrived at crime scenes before police. "Sometimes," Rabil said, "I get there so early, they think I'm a suspect."

And sometimes they think he's a nuisance. Both Rabil and Harrison have been accused of interfering with police.

Harrison makes no apologies. He sees getting there fast and getting close as his fundamental job and fundamental right.

"The lowest common denominator of news is to get ... down there at a scene while it's still happening," Harrison said. "There is no substitute for being there."

It's a rough-and-ready job that brings anywhere from $25 for a news tip to hundreds of dollars for video footage that goes national. The News & Observer has purchased photos from both men.

What it takes

The job takes sacrifice and an obsessive streak. Rabil usually drives separately from his wife and two daughters in case he hears of a car accident or violent crime. Last month, while photographing a bride-to-be on a beach, he heard news of a fatal surfing accident through his hand-held police scanner and took off, leaving the woman stranded in her wedding dress.

Both men sleep with scanners by their beds. Harrison said his personal relationships have suffered from his late-night bolts.

Rabil and Harrison are part of a flashbulb-popping tradition that persists despite the emergence of YouTube and camera phones. They're a throwback to the days when newshounds scoured the streets of big cities, said Kevin Barnhurst, head of the communication department at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"You had kind of scavenger reporters who were paid by the piece to collect stuff at the docks, the shipyards, the courts and the police stations," said Barnhurst, who has written several books on the history of news photography.

And in an era of news media staff cutbacks and consolidation, roaming photographers such as Rabil and Harrison help fill local newspapers and TV stations with images of wrecks and crime scenes that their full-time staffs can't always capture.

The freelancers' dogged presence in tense moments has also put them at odds with police. Smithfield police arrested Rabil in April after accusing him of refusing to stop shooting photos and video of a fatal accident. He claimed police harassment. Local officials asked the State Bureau of Investigation to review the incident.

Harrison said an officer took his camera and assaulted him at a scene where police had shot someone in November. A Durham magistrate refused to charge Harrison with disorderly conduct and interfering with an officer.

This give-and-take among freelancers and police tests a question crucial to press freedom, said John A. Bussian III, a Raleigh lawyer who specializes in First Amendment cases: "When and where can the investigating authorities stop the public and the press from being where they're lawfully entitled to be under normal circumstances?"

The watchdog

Rabil and Harrison took surprisingly different career paths to the same line of work. And they differ widely in how they view themselves.

Harrison sees himself as a watchdog, chronicling how police do their jobs while major media outlets often rely on police accounts of crime scenes.

Harrison, 57, moved from England to the Triangle in 1968 to work at a local television station. He was drafted into the Army during the Vietnam era and ended up working for Armed Forces Television in West Germany.

His freelancing has taken him from Nicaragua to Peru in Latin America gathering footage for British and American networks such as the BBC and the CBS national news. He still bears the scars of his time filming scenes of civil war in El Salvador -- a gunshot wound that partially paralyzed his left arm.

Harrison concedes that much of the footage he sells allows him to profit off mayhem and misery. But tragedy will happen, he said, and viewers want to know about it. And at times these images turn out to have a wider significance.

"It's life and death, what I do," Harrison said, talking on his cell phone as he cruised past an accident scene to see if it was worth shooting. It wasn't. "It may be down and dirty to see," he said, "but to me it's life."

The sharpshooter

While Harrison often turns the camera on crime scenes in the grittier parts of the Triangle, Rabil's stock in trade is the wrecks along I-95 and I-40. A few, including one image of a tractor-trailer that stuck upright, cab-first, in the Little River, have appeared on national television.

The grandson of Lebanese immigrants, Rabil grew up amid the sound of scanner chatter at his father's taxicab business, where the cab dispatchers used the same frequencies as the police and fire departments.

Rabil earned a degree in criminal justice and eventually began responding to emergencies as a volunteer medical technician.

He started tipping off a local news station when he was dispatched to a big accident or heard about a shooting on the scanners, sometimes for a small fee. Then a producer told him there was real money for pictures and video footage.

Rabil bought a camera. Within a few years, he had quit his day job, though he still shares the profits from the cab company he owns with his brother.

A fast talker who seems to be in constant motion, Rabil likes the action part of his job -- jumping into his Suburban at a moment's notice with his dog in the back and a point-and-shoot camera taped to the dashboard. In his trunk are his Sony 3CCD video cameras. He plans to go to high-definition video soon.

But Rabil sees himself less as a journalist than as the camera-toting equivalent of a Wild West gunman.

"I'm a sharpshooter," he said.

Even if he enjoys the outlaw persona, his recent arrest rubbed him the wrong way. Rabil carries copies of the Supreme Court ruling that allows him access to the scene of a crime, and says he stays behind the yellow tape police use to mark crime scenes.

Harrison also said he had long-running problems with the officer he says assaulted him.

In the past 20 years, Harrison has been charged with parking too close to police, resisting and obstructing an officer (three times), failing to obey an officer, and disorderly conduct. He was convicted once, in 1994, for resisting and obstructing a police officer.

Harrison said that the vast majority of police officers are respectful toward him but that a few resent his presence.

Both Harrison and Rabil insist they practice restraint in their work.

Rabil said he doesn't focus in close on dead bodies. And Harrison compares himself favorably to the Hollywood paparazzi, who also intrude into their subjects' lives but whose work serves no purpose, he said.

"I might chase someone down to get their picture, but not a celebrity," Harrison said. "I wouldn't chase Paris Hilton."
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/598603.html





PenTile Display Could Make Batteries Last 50% Longer
Charlie White

LCDs are unbelievably inefficient, but Clairvoyante has figured out a way to fix that with its PenTile RGBW display. The company claims the display will help laptop and cellphone batteries last 50% longer. The "W" in RGBW stands for white, where in addition to the red, green and blue subpixels used in each pixel of a conventional LCD display, Clairvoyante has added a white one, giving you a brighter picture and lessening the need for so much backlight. It's also made each pixel 33% larger, letting more light shine through. These are some fancy new tricks. There's more.

Using these techniques allows the backlight to be dynamically adjusted according to the scene that's being displayed. Hey, less backlight, less power. Cool. Or a different application could use the same amount of power and have a much brighter picture.

But adding a fourth subpixel to each dot will result in lower resolution, won't it? Yes, but the human eye may not be able to tell the difference, so say Clairvoyante reps, and they talk of a sharpening routine that improves the quality as well. Maybe they could just make the pixels smaller.

Nice idea to save all that battery power, but will the quality be good enough? We'll believe it when we see it. The company says it will be shipping software that controls this hardware to manufacturers by the end of this year, and we may see the first PenTile screens in early 2008.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/power_sip...ger-266399.php





Putting Energy Hogs in the Home on a Strict Low-Power Diet
Larry Magid

I THOUGHT I was pretty good about energy conservation, but it turns out that I’ve been a bit of a hypocrite. I drive a reasonably fuel-efficient car, I work at home so I don’t use fuel to commute and I am replacing incandescent bulbs in my home with energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs.

But I am also a prodigious computer user, and it looks as if that makes me an energy hog. I started checking how much electricity my electronics were consuming when I wasn’t using them. I used a Kill A Watt EZ energy meter (available online for about $25) and began measuring. My PC was continuously drawing 134 watts all night.

The more devices I checked, the worse it got. My TiVo digital video recorder was sucking down about 30 watts when it was not playing or recording a show. A Comcast digital cable set-top box made by Motorola that I tested was drawing about 40 watts. My DVD player was drawing 26 watts while idle, and my audio system — which I rarely turned off — was using 47 watts. This was in addition to the numerous power adapters and chargers, each drawing 1 or 2 watts, not to mention several other devices sipping energy to keep clocks running or to be ready to turn on at the push of a button.

I’m partly to blame for the audio system and DVD player. They do have on/off switches that I was failing to use. I had falsely assumed they were using relatively little power. But I tested DVR’s from Comcast, Dish Network and TiVo, and none went into a low-power mode. All of this wasted power was costing me money and pumping unnecessary CO2 into the atmosphere. My PC alone was contributing 2,000 pounds of CO2 annually. The DVR. was adding another 543 pounds.

Indeed, the Department of Energy estimates that in the average home, 40 percent of all electricity used to power home electronics is consumed while the products are turned off. Add that all up, and it equals the annual output of 17 power plants, the government says. In an effort to address that, a consortium of Intel, Google, PC makers and other technology companies this week announced their intent to increase the PC’s overall energy efficiency to 90 percent.

Products that idle in what the industry calls low-power mode, or lopomo, consumed about 10 percent of total electricity in California homes, according to a 2002 study prepared for the California Energy Commission by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. A few of those devices, even those with Energy Star ratings that signal that they are less wasteful, still use a lot of power. “Some of the larger big-screen TVs consume as much energy each year as a new refrigerator,” according to Noah Horowitz, a scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

You do not have to use an energy meter to reduce your consumption. If you don’t turn off your PC when it is not in use, make sure it goes into a low-power sleep, suspend or hibernate mode. That doesn’t always happen automatically. Windows XP has both a suspend and hibernate option, but it isn’t always turned on by default. Computers running the Windows XP operating system can be configured by clicking on Power Options in the Control Panel to set the number of minutes before Windows will turn off the monitor and hard disks or put the system into standby or hibernate mode. (Hibernation uses the least amount of energy). If it is a notebook PC, there are separate settings for when it runs on the battery and when it is plugged in.

Microsoft says that it has overhauled energy management in its Vista operating system so that machines, by default, should go into a low-power state after 60 minutes of inactivity. The PC sips only a few watts until the user touches the mouse or keyboard. To configure a machine with Vista, type “Power Options” in the search box at the bottom of the Start menu and click on “Change when the computer sleeps.”

All of this, of course, assumes that the systems are working correctly. When I first installed Vista on my PC, I configured it to go to sleep after 30 minutes, but it has been unreliable. Sometimes it fails to go to sleep, and at other times it fails to wake up. Sometimes I experience the worst of both worlds: the drives and fan are spinning, but the monitor is blank, and I cannot get the machine to come back to life without powering it down and turning it back on.

I spent numerous hours trying to fix the problem, including updating the BIOS, installing up-to-date versions of all my device drivers, checking to make sure there were no unnecessary applications running in the background and, of course, scanning for spyware and viruses. The results were encouraging. After all that fiddling, the machine went to sleep most nights and woke up most — but not all —mornings.

I then installed Co2 Saver (co2saver.snap.com), a free program for Windows XP and Vista that seems to have solved the problem. It gives you a simple control panel to specify when to turn off monitors and disk drives and put the machine to sleep. It also adjusts some hard-to-configure settings. One option forces the machine to “Initiate sleep mode if system doesn’t sleep automatically.” This feature, according to its developer, Lee Hasiuk, defeats Windows attempts to keep a machine awake if it thinks (correctly or otherwise) that it is detecting a background task other than mouse or keyboard activity. Now my machine sleeps and wakes properly almost all the time.

Whatever machine you’re using, consider having it go into sleep, standby or hibernate after about a half-hour of inactivity. The shorter the period, the more energy you save. Graphic-intense screen savers can actually waste power.

Unplug unused external power supplies because they can draw energy even when they’re not connected to a device.

If you’re shopping for a new PC, be sure that it meets Energy Star requirements, ideally the ones that go into effect July 20. The new standards require that 80 percent of the power consumed is actually used by the PC.

Use an L.C.D. screen instead of an old-fashioned cathode ray tube monitor. L.C.D.’s are as much as 66 percent more efficient than C.R.T.’s, according to the Energy Department.

Consider buying a notebook PC, rather than a less-efficient desktop. Because notebooks are designed to run on batteries, they’re equipped with chips and drives that draw less power. Seagate’s 160GB 2.5-inch drive uses one-fourth the energy of the equivalent 3.5-inch drive, according to a Seagate product manager, Joni Clark.

And because the screen is integrated on notebooks, there is only one power supply. I tested several notebooks, and all consumed under 30 watts except when charging the battery.

Consider a machine with a low-voltage processor like the Intel Core 2 Duo or one with A.M.D.’s “Cool and Quiet” technology. Trim desktop models also tend to use less energy. The new Hewlett-Packard Slimline models use about 45 watts, which is considerably lower than many larger PCs.

Comparing Apples to Apples, the $1,199 2-gigahertz iMac with a 17-inch monitor uses only 45 watts, and the 20-inch model uses 80 watts. (Apple’s high-end Mac Pro desktop workstation consumed a whopping 220 watts, without a monitor.) The iMac, according to Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, is optimized for energy savings because all the computer components are housed in the same chassis as the monitor, allowing for more efficient power distribution and cooling.

Tweaking can pay off. Annually, my desktop PC is now using 73 percent less energy — saving me $119 a year and depriving the earth of 1,405 more pounds of CO2.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/te.../14basics.html





Technology Group Seeks to Save Power
Laurie J. Flynn

Google and Intel are leading a consortium of major technology companies in an effort to sharply reduce the amount of power wasted by personal computers and servers.

In a separate development, Intel is expected to cut prices on some of its higher-end processors in July to make room for new power-saving chip technology expected in the second half of the year.

The energy-saving effort, announced yesterday, is called the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. It will also include a large-scale campaign to educate consumers and corporate computer managers about technology’s role in the emission of greenhouse gases.

Companies agreeing to Climate Savers standards will try to build machines that are at least 90 percent efficient in their power use by promoting new technologies, setting new standards and encouraging more efficient use by consumers.

“I think we can make a very large impact very quickly,” said Larry Page, who founded Google with Sergey Brin.

“All of this is doable today,” he said. “We’re just taking the opportunity to shoot for a higher bar.”

The initiative has received the support of I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Advanced Micro Devices, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft, among others. It is also supported by the National Wildlife Federation and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The group envisions better power management in computers, roughly equivalent to taking 11 million cars off the highway, according to Patrick P. Gelsinger, senior vice president in charge of Intel’s digital enterprise group.

Mr. Gelsinger said that the new technologies could result in price increases for consumers of about $20 a computer, but that customers would make up for the extra expense in energy savings within a year or two. Proposed rebates from utility companies will probably allow customers to recoup the additional expense even more quickly, he said.

Mr. Gelsinger declined to comment on the reports of impending price cuts, but company officials said that Intel routinely reduced prices throughout the year. Intel will cut prices of high-performance server processors sometime in July. The price cuts will come as Intel is preparing to introduce a new chip family this fall called Penryn, which promises a significant increase in performance without consuming more power.

But unlike the price cuts of last year, which set off a price war with Advanced Micro Devices, these price cuts are more routine, analysts say.

Henri Richard, executive vice president of Advanced Micro, said that his company had announced its own plans for price reductions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/te...=1&oref=slogin





Download Music, Share Bank Details on P2P

Researchers claim P2P cyber-criminals lurk to steal your data
Jaikumar Vijayan

It's not just the music industry that people need to worry about when downloading music from P2P networks.

A surprisingly high number of consumers sharing music and other files on peer-to-peer systems are inadvertently exposing all sorts of bank account and similar personal information on their computers to criminals lurking on the networks to harvest data. And its not just users at home that are exposing information about themselves; so are a large number of employees within banks, as well as their contractors and suppliers.

That's the conclusion of a study on the dangers of inadvertent data disclosure on file sharing networks that was conducted by Dartmouth University's Tuck School of Business.

The study examined data involving P2P searches and files related to the top 30 US banks over a seven-week period between December 2006 and February 2007. The university used a search engine technology from Triversa to gather and analyze all P2P traffic that mentioned these banks by name or mapped to a specific digital footprint that Dartmouth created for each financial institution. Data was gathered from P2P networks such as Gnutella, FastTrack, edonkey and Bittorrent.

The analysis showed that a large number of searches made on those networks were aimed at uncovering sensitive financial data from individuals, said study author Eric Johnson, a professor of operations management at the school's Center for Digital Strategies. "Our analysis clearly reveals a significant information risk firms and individuals face from P2P file sharing networks," he said.

When people use popular P2P clients such as KaZaa, Limewire, BearShare, Morpheus and FastTrack, they often are sharing far more than just media files, Johnson said. "In many cases they are sharing the contents of their entire hard drive with all sorts of information" with others on the file-sharing network, Johnson said.

That's because many of these client tools are designed specifically to quickly search for and share certain types of media files on a user's system. Johnson said, Normally, such P2P clients allow users to download files to and share items from a particular folder. But if proper care is not taken to control the access that these clients have on a system, it is very easy to expose far more data than intended, he said.

There are several ways this can happen, Johnson noted in his research paper. For instance, when a music file is accidentally dropped into a folder containing other data, the contents of the entire folder could end up being shared on a P2P network without a user's knowledge. Many P2P client software tools have confusing interfaces that could result in users sharing folders that they did not intend to. Similarly, some file-sharing apps feature wizards that scan an individual's computer and recommend folders containing media to share. If a sensitive file exists in one of those recommended folders, it could get exposed, Johnson wrote in his research.

The kind of information that can be exposed in this manner is astounding, Johnson said. "We found files containing all the information needed to commit identity theft. We found almost every kind of business documents from spreadsheets to performance reviews. In one instance, we found a bank spreadsheet with account information on 23.000 business accounts that was leaked. We even found a security evaluation done by a third party contractor" of a bank network.

Almost 80 per cent of the leaked information analyzed in the Dartmouth study came from home PC users. The rest came from systems belonging to bank employees or their partners, Johnson said.

While some of the information was inadvertently leaked, there are growing signs that cybercriminals are using P2P networks to specifically search for and harvest such data, Johnson said. A significant portion of the search terms that were analyzed during the Dartmouth study appeared to be looking for databases, account and user information, passwords, as well as routing and pin numbers, Johnson said.

Sometimes, sensitive data was accidentally exposed by the coincidental association of a search term with sensitive information. For example, users searching for songs containing the terms "Golden" Or "West" in the title pulled up files containing account information belonging to Golden West bank, Johnson said in his report. Similarly, users looking to download the song State Street Residential sometimes pulled in data belonging to State Street bank customers.

The Dartmouth study raises concerns similar to those contained in a report released in March by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). That report was based on an analysis of five specific features included in file-sharing software from Kazaa, Limeware, Morpheus, BearShare and eDonkey. The report concluded that the distributors of the software deliberately included these features in their tools, despite knowing that the features could cause users to inadvertently share sensitive data with others on P2P networks.

The report was sent to the US Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission and the National Association of Attorneys General.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=18272





Connecticut AG Investigates Pfizer Security Breach
Bill Berkrot

Connecticut's attorney general said on Monday he is investigating the breach of confidential information of thousands of employees of drugmaker Pfizer Inc., including that of 305 state residents.

Richard Blumenthal said in a news release that he has sent a letter to Pfizer requesting that they take specific steps to protect their employees.

"My office will seek all relevant information from Pfizer about this security breach and fight to assure that its employees have as much protection as possible from the scourge of identity theft," Blumenthal said.

Pfizer, the world's biggest drugmaker, said prior to Blumenthal's request, it had already sent letters to some 17,000 current and former employees notifying them of the security breach and steps being taken to address concerns following the unauthorized disclosure of names, social security numbers and in some cases addresses and bonus information.

"Keep in mind that Pfizer has no indication that any unauthorized individual has used or is using your personal information," the letter, dated June 1, said.

The personal information had been stored on a company laptop computer that Pfizer provided to an employee for use in her home. It got out due to the unauthorized installation of certain file sharing software, the company said.

"Immediately after Pfizer learned of this incident we retrieved the laptop, disabled the unauthorized file sharing software, and conducted an investigation to determine which files, if any, were exposed," the letter to employees said.

"Although our investigation revealed that files containing names and social security number data were exposed to and, in some instances, accessed by one or more unauthorized persons over a 'peer to peer' network, we are unable to determine the identity or location of those persons, or whether any particular file was opened or examined. Our investigation is on going," the letter continued.

The letter also said the investigation has been unable to determine whether the sensitive data were copied.

Pfizer said it would provide affected employees with one year of credit monitoring at no cost and encouraged them to continue to use the service even if initial reports do not find any potentially suspicious activity.

The company also agreed to fund $25,000 of identity theft insurance for affected employees with no deductible provided by a designated, third-party insurer.

Pfizer said it has contacted the three major U.S. credit agencies to inform them of the incident.

"Please rest assured that Pfizer takes data security very seriously and we have already taken steps to minimize any risk from this incident," the letter said.

"In addition, we will continue to investigate and monitor this particular situation. Should there be any further significant developments in this matter, we will notify you."

The letter, signed by Pfizer privacy officer Lisa Goldman, ended with an apology for any inconvenience.
http://investing.reuters.co.uk/news/...2853-OISHE.XML





Huge Number of Police Files Leaked Through Winny File-Sharing Software

A huge amount of police investigation information including data on crimes such as rape and attempted murder has been leaked over computer networks through the file-sharing software program Winny, it has been learned.

Files obtained by the Mainichi show that more than 1.6 gigabytes of information and about 10,000 files were leaked, making it the biggest leak of police information to date.

Police confirmed the leak on Tuesday evening. They said about 10,000 files had been leaked from a personal computer used by a 26-year-old officer in the community affairs division of Kitazawa Police Station, and believed that some of the data included investigative information.

Sources said that the information, the equivalent of about 800 floppy disks worth of data, was likely to have leaked this spring. It included photographs believed to be of suspects under surveillance, calling records of suspects, police questioning reports and many other investigation files such as reports on criminal record testing results.

In addition, there were folders listed by crime types such as "rape related," "attempted murder" and "unnatural deaths." These folders included documents on incidents involving minors listing personal information such as their names and addresses.

Most of the data was produced between 2004 and 2005, and the information contained many files thought to be official documents containing the names of multiple police stations of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and the names of police departments dealing with organized crimes.

Last spring, the National Police Agency sent out an emergency notice to prefectural police headquarters around the nation banning the use of Winny not just on computers used for work, but also on personal computers. The move came in response to leaks of information such as those involving Okayama and Ehime prefectural police.

The most recent announcement suggests that Winny is becoming a serious cause of information leaks in Japan. Police said they were working to control the situation.

"We are investigating the facts of the case and want to deal with the situation quickly," MPD official Hirofumi Kitamura said.

Winny was released in May 2002, and can be downloaded from multiple sites free of charge. It is designed so that it remains unknown which users possess which files, and what people are downloading.
http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/nation...na011000c.html





FBI: Operation Bot Roast Finds Over 1 Million Botnet Victims
Layer 8

The Department of Justice and FBI today said ongoing investigations have identified over 1 million botnet crime victims. The FBI is working with industry partners, including the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University, to notify the victim owners of the computers. Microsoft and the Botnet Task Force have also helped out the FBI. Through this process the FBI may uncover additional incidents in which botnets have been used to facilitate other criminal activity, the FBI said in a statement.

The FBI and Justice Dept. have an ongoing cyber crime initiative to disrupt and dismantle botherders known as Operation Bot Roast. To date, the project has nabbed:

* James C. Brewer of Arlington, Texas, is alleged to have operated a botnet that infected Chicago area hospitals. This botnet infected tens of thousands of computers worldwide.

* Jason Michael Downey of Covington, Kentucky, is charged with using botnets to send a high volume of traffic to intended recipients to cause damage by impairing the availability of such systems.

* Robert Alan Soloway of Seattle, Washington, is alleged to have used a large botnet network and spammed tens of millions of unsolicited email messages to advertise his website from which he offered services and products.

Bots are widely recognized as one of the top scourges of the industry. Gartner predicts that by year-end 75% of enterprises "will be infected with undetected, financially motivated, targeted malware that evaded traditional perimeter and host defenses," and early reports from beta customers of a yet to be released product from Mi5 show how nefarious these infections can be.

Mi5 says it installed a Web security beta product at an organization with 12,000 nodes and in one month detected 22 active bots, 123 inactive bots and was watching another 313 suspected bots. That may not sound like a lot, but those bots were responsible for 136 million bot-related incidents, such as scanning for other hosts inside the firewall.

Google researchers recently said at least one in 10 web pages is booby-trapped with malware. Google's Ghost in the Browser study looked at over 4.5 million Web pages, and found that 10% of them were capable of activating malicious codes and 16% were suspected to contain codes that might be a threat to computers.

Most owners of the compromised computers are unknowing and unwitting victims. They have unintentionally allowed unauthorized access and use of their computers as a vehicle to facilitate other crimes, such as identity theft, denial of service attacks, phishing, click fraud, and the mass distribution of spam and spyware. Because of their widely distributed capabilities, botnets are a growing threat to national security, the national information infrastructure, and the economy, the FBI said.

"The majority of victims are not even aware that their computer has been compromised or their personal information exploited," said FBI Assistant Director for the Cyber Division James Finch. "An attacker gains control by infecting the computer with a virus or other malicious code and the computer continues to operate normally. Citizens can protect themselves from botnets and the associated schemes by practicing strong computer security habits to reduce the risk
http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/16193





China Aims to Top U.S. in Cyberspace: U.S. General
Jim Wolf

China is seeking to unseat the United States as the dominant power in cyberspace, a U.S. Air Force general leading a new push in this area said Wednesday.

"They're the only nation that has been quite that blatant about saying, 'We're looking to do that,'" 8th Air Force Commander Lt. Gen. Robert Elder told reporters.

Elder is to head a new three-star cyber command being set up at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, already home to about 25,000 military personnel involved in everything from electronic warfare to network defense.

The command's focus is to control the cyber domain, critical to everything from communications to surveillance to infrastructure security.

"We have peer competitors right now in terms of doing computer network attack ... and I believe we're going to be able to ratchet up our capability," Elder said. "We're going to go way ahead."

The Defense Department said in its annual report on China's military power last month that China regarded computer network operations -- attacks, defense and exploitation -- as critical to achieving "electromagnetic dominance" early in a conflict.

China's People's Liberation Army has established information warfare units to develop viruses to attack enemy computer systems and networks, the Pentagon said.

China also was investing in electronic countermeasures and defenses against electronic attack, including infrared decoys, angle reflectors and false-target generators, it said.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry rejected the U.S. report as "brutal interference" in China's internal affairs and insisted Beijing's military preparations were purely defensive.

Elder described the bulk of current alleged Chinese cyber-operations as industrial espionage aimed at stealing trade secrets to save years of high-tech development.

He attributed the espionage to a mix of criminals, hackers and "nation-state" forces. Virtually all potential U.S. foes also were scanning U.S. networks for trade and defense secrets, he added.

"Everyone but North Korea," he said. "We've concluded that there must be only one laptop in all of North Korea -- and that guy's not allowed to scan" overseas networks, Elder said.

In October, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff defined cyberspace as "characterized by the use of electronics and the electromagnetic spectrum to store, modify, and exchange data via networked systems and associated physical infrastructures."

The definition is broad enough to cover far more than merely defending or attacking computer networks. Other concerns include remotely detonated roadside bombs in Iraq, interference with Global Positioning Satellites and satellite communications, Internet financial transactions by adversaries, and radar and navigational jamming.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...35835020070613





Yahoo Says Beijing Likely Blocking Photo Site
Sophie Taylor

Flickr.com, one of the world's most popular online photo-sharing sites and owned by Yahoo Inc., is likely being blocked by the Chinese government, Yahoo's Hong Kong unit said on Tuesday.

Flickr -- popular among a growing class of digital photo enthusiasts in the world's second-largest Internet market -- has not shown photos to users in mainland China since last week, amid rumours Beijing took action after images of the Tiananmen massacre in early June 1989 were posted.

"It is our understanding that Flickr users in China are not able to see images on Flickr, and we have confirmed that this is not a technical issue on our end," a spokeswoman for Yahoo Hong Kong said in an email in response to a Reuters inquiry.

"It appears that the Chinese government is restricting access to Flickr, although we have not received confirmation from them," the spokeswoman said in the email.

"We are currently investigating this issue and hope that it is only a temporary one," she added.

Officials from China's Ministry of Information Industry could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

The Communist Party has banned references to the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in state media, the Internet and books as part of a whitewash campaign, meaning most young Chinese are ignorant of the events.

Public discussion of the massacre is still taboo in China and the government has rejected calls to overturn the verdict that the student-led protests were subversive. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed when the army crushed the democracy movement.

A newspaper in southwest China sacked three of its editors over an advertisement saluting mothers of protesters killed in the crackdown, sources told Reuters last week.

Yahoo is also no stranger to challenges while operating in China, which has over 140 million Web users.

Press watchdogs accused Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd. two years ago of providing details about e-mail communications that helped identify, and were used as evidence against, Shi Tao, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for leaking state secrets abroad.

Yahoo Inc. defended itself at the time by saying it had to abide by local Chinese laws.

Flickr also said on Monday it is moving to further internationalise its service by creating versions in seven major languages besides English, including Chinese.

Yahoo China -- which was absorbed by e-commerce company Alibaba [ALI.UL] in 2005 -- had a nine percent share of China's online photo-sharing market last year, according to IT consultancy iResearch.

Online services such as Flickr, Shutterfly Inc., Eastman Kodak's EasyShare Gallery and Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Snapfish let users load digital pictures online, where they can be edited, shared with others, printed and mailed.
http://www.reuters.com/article/compa...14296620070613





Yamaha Wins Piracy Case in China
UPI

China's highest court awarded Yamaha Motor $1.1 million in damages, the highest ever for a piracy case in China involving a foreign investor.

Yamaha's recent Supreme People's Court win ended a five-year legal challenge between the motorcycle maker and the Chinese company Zhejiang Huatian, based in Taizhou in Zhejiang province.

Zhejiang Huatian registered a shell company in a remote area of Japan in 2000 under the same three characters used by Yamaha to translate its name into Chinese, Forbes reported Wednesday. The shell company signed a licensing agreement with Zhejiang Huatian, allowing it to market scooters in China under that three-character name. Zhejiang Huatian translated and printed the three characters -- Yamaha's name in Chinese -- in English letters on its scooters.

On its Web site, Zhejiang Huatian claims to be China's largest motorcycle maker by sales, saying it produced the nation's first "luxurious scooter" in 1992.
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Busines...in_china/1925/





Imported Toothpaste Recalled

Five-ounce tubes of toothpaste labeled Colgate and sold in discount stores in four states are being recalled because they may contain a poisonous chemical, according to the importer.

A Food and Drug Administration official, Doug Arbesfeld, confirmed that testing had found the chemical in a product with the Colgate label. But he said the agency is unsure if it is really Colgate or a counterfeit.

''We are aware that toothpaste is something that's been counterfeited in the past,'' he said. ''We don't want to alarm people unnecessarily.''

There was no immediate reply to an e-mail message left with a Colgate-Palmolive spokesman Wednesday evening.

MS USA Trading, Inc. of North Bergen, N.J., said the toothpaste may contain diethylene glycol, a chemical found in antifreeze.

The company said the toothpaste, imported from South Africa, was sold in discount stores in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland.

''Made in South Africa'' is printed on the box and includes Regular, Gel, Triple and Herbal versions.

The company said the problem was discovered in routine testing by the Food and Drug Administration. It said no illnesses have been reported to date.

The same chemical has led to the recall of several brands of toothpaste imported from China in recent weeks.

Consumers who have purchased 5-ounce toothpaste under the Colgate label can return them to the place of purchase for a refund, MS USA Trading said.
http://www.newsday.com/news/politics...tics-headlines





Hindu Group Making Software to Partly Block Orkut
Krittivas Mukherjee

A right-wing Hindu group has asked public Internet centres in India to partly block access to Orkut, and is making a software to monitor abusive communities on the popular social networking site operated by Google.

The student wing of the Shiv Sena party said many Indians use Orkut to bad-mouth religious groups and disturb communal harmony, and also spread misinformation about India.

The group is part of a growing band of cultural vigilantes opposed to what they see as increasing mimicry of the West. It often stops St. Valentine's Day celebrations, attacks clubs and pubs and prevents screening of sexually bold films.

"Orkut is used by many destructive elements to spread canards about India, Hindus, our gods and cultural heritage," said Abhijit Phanse, president of Bharatiya Vidyarthi Sena, the student group.

"We are gently telling Internet cafe owners that it is their responsibility to see that surfers do not use their facility to carry out such hate campaigns," he said.

"Or else, we will have to do that job for them."

Last week, dozens of Shiv Sena workers vandalised some Internet centres, saying they were not stopping their customers from accessing Orkut groups involved in sending hate messages.

"We are not saying all of Orkut should be shut. We are just saying stop access to those groups that indulge in hate campaigns," Phanse said.

Internet cafe owners said they had received a letter from the group saying that if they did not spot and stop people surfing Orkut to spread hate messages, their businesses would be attacked.

"The letter was pasted on our wall. But what can we do? It is up to the Internet service providers to block a site," said a cyber cafe owner who was too scared to be named.

Phanse said his group was developing a special software that Internet service providers could install to block any message containing certain words and phrases such as "I hate" or "I despise".

"The software should be ready in 2-3 months," Phanse said, adding that they were hoping to involve Orkut authorities in the discussions.
http://www.reuters.com/article/lates.../idUSDEL277481





A Dog or a Cat? New Tests to Fool Automated Spammers
Brad Stone

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a human — until you fill out a captcha.

Captchas are the puzzles on many Web sites that present a string of distorted letters and numbers. These are supposed to be easy for people to read and retype, but hard for computer software to figure out.

Most major Internet companies use captchas to keep the automated programs of spammers from infiltrating their sites.

There is only one problem. As online mischief makers design better ways to circumvent or defeat captchas, Web companies are responding by making the puzzles more challenging to solve — even for people.

They are twisting the letters, distorting the backgrounds, adding a confusing kaleidoscope of colors and generally making it difficult for humans.

“They are creating tests that a reasonably healthy adult can’t pass,” said Gordon Weakliem, a programmer and blogger from Denver, who says he failed to correctly discern the captcha code several times last week on the sign-up page for the Windows Live service of Microsoft.

With captchas getting easier for computers and more difficult for real people, several Internet companies, including Microsoft and eBay, are working on replacements.

“You can make a captcha absolutely undefeatable by computers, but at some point, you are turning this from a human reading test into an intelligence test and an acuity test,” said Michael Barrett, the chief information security officer at PayPal, a division of eBay. “We are clearly at the point where captchas have hit diminishing returns.”

If that is true, at least captchas had a good run. Though several researchers devised similar tests early in the decade, credit for inventing the technology usually goes to Carnegie Mellon University, which was asked by Yahoo in 2000 to create a method to prevent rogue programs from invading its chat rooms and e-mail service.

University researchers devised a collection of cognitive puzzles that they knew modern computers could not solve. They called their approach the Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart, or captcha for short. The reference was to the computer scientist Alan Turing, who did research into ways to tell man from machine in the 1950s.

Captchas quickly became popular online and soon expanded into new dimensions. When advocates for the visually impaired complained that some people could not read the puzzles, many sites added audio versions, where a computer voice recites a string of letters and numbers, often over noises in the background.

The emergence of the technology started a wave of research into ways to make computers smart enough to crack the puzzles.

Yet some of that activity can be ethically murky. Aleksey Kolupaev, 25, works for an Internet company in Kiev, Ukraine, and in his spare time, with his friend Juriy Ogijenko, he develops and sells software that can thwart captchas by analyzing the images and separating the letters and numbers from the background noise. They charge $100 to $5,000 a project, depending on the complexity of the puzzle.

Mr. Kolupaev said he had worked both for legitimate companies that want to test their own security and for spammers who seek to infiltrate Web sites.

“Nothing is unbreakable, and each system has its own weakness,” he said. “If you create a program that only recognizes one picture from a hundred, it’s not a problem. You just hit the site 100 times, and you break through.”

On his Web site, ocr-research.org.ua, Mr. Kolupaev boasts of cracking the captchas of companies like MySpace and PayPal; the site also ranks the effectiveness of each captcha. He says he believes that his work makes the Internet more secure because companies tend to improve the captchas that he critiques.

Internet companies have responded to these challenges by making their captchas more complex. On YouTube, for example, the letters and numbers in the captcha float on an uneven grid of colors. On the technology news site Slashdot, random squiggly lines slice through the letters and numbers, as if a child had scrawled with a pen on each puzzle.

All these tricks are attempts to disguise the boundaries of the characters, so that software cannot identify the numbers and letters.

But often these measures prove too tough for humans to decipher as well. On Ticketmaster’s site, the characters appear over a grid of diagonal lines that are so thick that they often obscure the puzzle. Jacob Hanson, the chief technology officer of HireVue, an online employment agency in Salt Lake City, estimated that he had failed to solve the Ticketmaster captcha once every four times.

“I can only imagine someone like my mom trying to go through it,” he said.

As a result, the hunt is on for puzzles that are friendlier to humans and more difficult for computers. Many researchers are focusing on expanding the test beyond the constrained realm of 26 letters and 9 digits.

Microsoft researchers have developed an alternative captcha that asks Internet users to view nine images of household pets and then select just the cats or the dogs.

“For software, this is wildly hard,” said John Douceur, a Microsoft researcher. “Computers are tripped up by all the photos at different angles, with variable lighting conditions and backgrounds and the animals in different positions.”

The project, called Asirra (for Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access), uses photographs of animals from Petfinder.com, a site that finds homes for homeless pets and has more than two million images in its database.

Other companies prefer to keep their next-generation captcha research quiet. Mr. Barrett of PayPal will say only that the new breed of captchas might resemble simple image identification puzzles, like asking users to view pictures of a head of lettuce, a tree and a whale — and pick out the vegetable.

“Captchas have gotten as good as they are going to get, and it is likely they are going to be slowly supplanted with a different technology that achieves the same thing,” he said.

He added: “No single defensive technology is forever. If they were, we would all be living in fortified castles with moats.”

Not everyone feels that the traditional captcha is finished. Luis von Ahn, a professor at Carnegie Mellon and a member of the team that invented captchas, recently unveiled an effort to give them new usefulness.

His reCaptcha project (recaptcha.net) seeks to block spam while handling the challenge of digitally scanning old books and making them available in Web search engines.

When character recognition software fails to decipher a word scanned in a book — when the page is yellowed or the letters are smudged, for example — Mr. von Ahn’s project makes it part of a captcha. After the mystery word has been verified by several people, it is fed back into the digital copy of the book.

“I heard that 60 million captchas are solved every day around the world, which first made me quite happy for myself but then quite sad,” he said. “It takes about 10 seconds to solve a captcha, so that means humanity is wasting thousands of hours solving them. I wanted to do something good for humanity in that time.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/te...gy/11code.html





A Few Details of the iPhone Galvanize the Apple Cadre
Andrew Adam Newman

These days advertisers fret over DVR owners fast-forwarding through their commercials, but that was far from the case with the release by Apple last week of four iPhone commercials, which viewers pored over with Talmudic intensity.

The product was announced in January, and some teaser ads for it ran during the Academy Awards ceremonies in February. Last week, three new television commercials for the iPhone divulged the product’s release date — June 29 — and showed off a range of features that led Apple fans to seek more details.

While the ad campaign, by TBWA/Chiat/Day, highlighted some functions, the individual commercials are being parsed to determine precisely how the phone will operate. In a typical post, Erica Sadun on the Unofficial Apple Weblog (www.tuaw.com) extrapolated how the device’s e-mail and map search functions might work, based on the mere seconds that each function was shown in the commercials.

At Macenstein.com, a “Dr. Macenstein” wrote on June 3 that for a moment in one of the ads, the iPhone’s screen had 12 icons, each representing a function, where earlier promotional material featured only 11. What was this “mystery” application, he wondered, and then said four days later that the 12-icon shot had been edited out of the same commercial featured on apple.com.

Many bloggers also wrote that fine print initially appearing in ads — which said that iPhone purchasers would be locked into a "minimum new two-year activation plan" with AT&T — was absent from similar ads posted on apple.com, leading, of course, to speculation whether iPhone buyers would have to sign such a contract. An Apple spokesman declined to comment on an AT&T plan or any other aspect of the iPhone or its commercials.

It is typical for Apple to remain silent, even if speaking up would quash rumors, said Tim Beyers, who wrote about the iPhone ads for the Motley Fool (fool.com). “When Apple does nothing to stop rumors from circulating, the feeding frenzy gets more and more intense,” Mr. Beyers said. “They like to allow the pot to be stirred and not to disturb it, just like a fine sauce simmering. The nature of Apple is that by virtue of the fact that they talk sparingly, they get talked about — they create this almost audible buzz.”

After Apple’s initial announcement in January, “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” broadcast a fake iPhone commercial in which the device was used in myriad ways, including as a bottle opener, electric shaver, blow-dryer and condiment dispenser. In one segment, it helped give a pregnant woman a sonogram.

Forensics on the real iPhone commercials included sleuthing by Taylor Johnston, who writes about music on his Web site, musicforants.com. Mr. Johnston, who just finished his junior year at Illinois State University, focused on a segment of one ad where the user scrolls quickly through his music library, noting performers like Beck and Lily Allen.

“If you look closely, though, there’s a wealth of other good music that the iPhone is playing,” said Mr. Johnston, who praised Apple for featuring indie-rock darlings like Feist and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah over mainstream chart-toppers.

“I’m a huge Apple geek,” he said in an interview. “I don’t think there’s any product out there where people are so attached to the company. You can like Snickers bars, but you’re not going to be scouring the Internet for all the information you can get about a Snickers bar.”

Pacific Catch, a restaurant in San Francisco whose phone number appeared momentarily in one of the iPhone ads, averaged 100 extra calls a day the next week, the general manager, Rob Schechtman, said. Apple’s ad agency got the restaurant’s permission beforehand.

Calls came from as far away as Africa and included a collect call from a county jail; the restaurant did not accept the charges.

“I assume he saw the commercial and maybe wanted to know if we delivered,” Mr. Schechtman said.

Most callers are merely curious if it is a real restaurant, while others are more persistent. “Some people ask about the iPhone — when it was coming out and how much it would cost,” Mr. Schechtman said. “And I say, ‘We’re a restaurant, not an Apple Store.’ ” The restaurant’s computer system, he said, is actually PC-based.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/te.../11iphone.html





Why You May Not Want An iPhone
Dan Frommer

Give Steve Jobs credit: He's managed to get the entire tech community--and much of the rest of the world--talking about a pricey gadget that only a handful have seen or touched.

Apple's iPhone finally goes on sale June 29, and for many potential buyers, the only issue is whether they'll be able to get their hands on one, as it's certain to sell out immediately. But whether you are a music lover, a business e-mail addict, a mobile power-user or just a normal consumer, there are several good reasons to think twice about dropping $500 for the first-generation iPhone.

Will that be enough to slow iPhone sales after the initial rush? There are, after all, plenty of other options for consumers who want a smart phone, which is essentially a high-end phone with the ability to do other functions, like e-mail. Previously just expensive toys for information technology nerds and executives, smart phones are gaining mainstream appeal. Research firm Yankee Group projects that smart phones will grow from 11% of this year's mobile-phone market to about 20% of phone sales in 2010.

Jobs hopes to pick up 1% of the market by the end of 2008. But consumers are finicky and have options. If Apple's iPhone doesn't stack up, numerous competitors, like Samsung, LG Electronics, Nokia and a host of phones running rival Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform, will be happy to take their business. (Elevation Partners, the private equity firm that has invested in Forbes Media, has announced plans to buy a 25% stake in iPhone competitor Palm).

The iPhone's battery is one example of a feature that could flop. By all indications--Apple is still being mum about almost all details regarding the device--the iPhone's rechargeable battery is sealed inside its case. That's what Apple does already with its iPod devices, presumably to save space. The company says the battery will last up to five hours of talking, watching video and browsing the Internet.

But it's not clear how those claims will measure up in the real world. What happens if you use the phone's wi-fi connection heavily? Or a Bluetooth earpiece? Without a midday charging pit stop, iPhone owners may have to consistently choose between using its Web and multimedia features or saving battery power for phone calls.

Other smart phones have similar battery drawbacks. Palm, for example, says the battery in its newest Treo 755p will last for up to four hours and 12 minutes of talk time. But when that's up, you can easily swap out the Treo battery for a charged replacement. Many people carry a spare, especially while traveling on business. With the iPhone, it seems you may be tethered to a backup-battery accessory, which is far from ideal.

Making matters worse, rechargeable batteries have a limited lifespan and can be charged only a finite number of times. This number varies, but Apple says a properly maintained iPod battery--whatever that really means--can retain 80% of its original capacity after 400 full charging cycles. Eventually, it will hold a charge so short that it must be replaced, which could at best mean a trip to an Apple or AT&T store, or at worst, an annoying, mail-in battery replacement service.

The iPhone's stripped-down data features could also provide incentive to wait for a better offer. Apple's boilerplate is that the iPhone is a "revolutionary" device for browsing the Internet on the go. To an extent, it has a point: Apple's Safari is arguably the most powerful mobile Web browser. And the iPhone's large display will surely make surfing the Web more enjoyable and functional than on a tiny Motorola Razr screen.

But for whatever reason, Apple decided not to allow the iPhone to work on AT&T's fastest, "third-generation" (or 3G) wireless network, opting instead for its slower "EDGE" network. The difference is apparent even on a small-screen device browsing scaled-down, mobile-edition Web sites. When you're surfing full-size Web pages, as Apple touts on the iPhone, the slow speeds could be a deal breaker.

During Apple's first-quarter earnings conference call, finance chief Peter Oppenheimer said the company is "very much sold" on the slower network because it is more widespread in the U.S. This is a valid point, sort of. AT&T says it has 3G coverage available in 165 major U.S. metro areas, with dozens more on the way, and EDGE coverage in 13,000 cities and towns. But a 3G device can seamlessly hop between the faster and slower networks. And many of the iPhone's competitors, like the 7-month-old Samsung BlackJack, do just that. So why did Apple skimp?

One reason may be the iPhone's built-in wi-fi capability, meaning it can connect to local hot spots and avoid AT&T's data network altogether. This is much faster than using the cellular Web, but imperfect. Wi-fi access is not as universal as you think, and often it's not free. Spending $10 to use a faster Internet at Starbucks doesn't sound practical on top of a $40-per-month, all-you-can-eat EDGE data plan. You may already have a wi-fi hot spot in your home or office--but chances are, you have a computer there, too, with a screen larger than 3.5 inches.

Then again, wi-fi may be a cool feature if Apple opens the iPhone up to developers to write interesting software like network or peer-to-peer games, on-the-go photo sharing software or any other mobile-friendly apps. Jobs is particularly fond of the iPhone's Google Maps software, which he says "blows away" any previous version, and the iPod music software, which he says is "the best iPod we've ever made." But it's not clear if Apple will let other people write software for the iPhone, at least right away, and that could be a reason to stay away.

For example, if you're looking to check your corporate e-mail with any ease, you may have to wait. It's not clear if the iPhone's e-mail software will initially--or imminently--support "push" e-mail from Microsoft Exchange e-mail servers or Research in Motion BlackBerry servers. Apple has a deal with Yahoo! to support real-time "push" e-mail delivery. But CrackBerry addicts should be iPhone-hesitant, at least until we get more information about compatibility. (RIM did not immediately return a request for comment.) Jobs said recently that Apple is "working to find a way to allow developers to build applications" but that security is a sticking point.

Rabid e-mailers or texters may also be skeptical about the iPhone's keyboard-free design. Jobs dislikes the tiny QWERTY thumb keyboards on many of today's smart phones, with good reason: Typing is slower and less accurate than on a normal, full-sized keyboard.

But it's not apparent that typing on a touchscreen will necessarily be any better. Many BlackBerry users, once familiar with the keyboard, can type without looking. Can you thumb out a text message on an iPhone screen without undivided attention? Will it work in the rain? Or if you're wearing a bandage? Will it scratch, as the iPod screens have been infamous for?

Lastly, one of the most anticipated, unknown iPhone features is its real price tag. We already know that it will cost $500 to $600, depending on storage capacity. But AT&T's contract requirements could easily quadruple that price. To qualify for the lowest pricing on many smart phones, carriers require that you subscribe to an all-you-can-eat data plan for around $40 per month, in addition to a $40-or-more-per-month calling plan.

So much for getting the cheapest calling plan and just using the wi-fi feature for the Internet. Add text messaging and taxes, and you're looking at a bill near $90 per month. Over the two-year contract period, that's more than $2,000.

Businesses manage that expense for executives' BlackBerrys, but will consumers happily pay that much? AT&T says existing customers will get the same deal as new customers switching from Verizon Wireless or Sprint Nextel--but subscribers will have to extend their contract for two more years. Will AT&T offer a version for prepaid service subscribers? Many consumers can justify buying a $500 smart phone/iPod hybrid. But AT&T's service terms could break the deal.
http://www.forbes.com/home/wireless/...phonemain.html





That iPhone Has a Keyboard, but It’s Not Mechanical
John Markoff

If there is a billion-dollar gamble underlying Apple’s iPhone, it lies in what this smart cellphone does not have: a mechanical keyboard.

As the clearest expression yet of the Apple chief executive’s spartan design aesthetic, the iPhone sports only one mechanical button, to return a user to the home screen. It echoes Steven P. Jobs’s decree two decades ago that a computer mouse should have a single button. (Most computer mice these days have two.) His argument was that one button ensured that it would be impossible to push the wrong button.

The keyboard is built into other phones, those designed for businesspeople as well as those for teenagers. But the lack of a keyboard could be seen as a clever industrial design solution. It has permitted the iPhone to have a 3.5-inch screen. A big screen makes the phone attractive for alternative uses like watching movies and that could open up new revenue streams for Apple and its partner, AT&T.

The downside is that typing is done by pecking on the screen with thumbs or fingers, something hardly anyone outside of Apple has experienced yet. “The tactile feedback of a mechanical keyboard is a pretty important aspect of human interaction,” said Bill Moggeridge, a founder of Ideo, an industrial design company in Palo Alto, Calif. “If you take that away you tend to be very insecure.”

Mr. Jobs and other Apple executives argue that the keyboard that pops up onscreen will be a painless compromise. The iPhone’s onscreen keyboard has a dictionary-lookup feature that tries to predict the word being typed, catching errors as they are made.

That, of course, requires users to learn the new system, a task that Apple executives acknowledge may require several days. Last month at an industry conference, Mr. Jobs dismissed doubts about the decision to rely on a virtual keyboard, saying that users only had to learn to trust the keyboard, “and then you will fly.”

Yet in the days before the phone is scheduled to go on sale at Apple and AT&T stores around the country, designers and marketers of electronic devices centers are having a spirited debate about whether consumers will have the patience to overcome the hurdle that will be required to type without the familiar tactile feedback offered by conventional keyboards.

Apple is making other compromises. The AT&T Edge cellular network transmits data more slowly than those of rivals, but the iPhone will still be equipped with Wi-Fi for Web access. The phone will not accept memory cards.

The keyboard, however, is the biggest worry. At worst, customers will return the products. Currently AT&T gives customers 30 days to return handsets, but it is not clear whether it will maintain that policy for the iPhone. Any significant number of returns of the iPhone could conceivably undermine what until now has been a remarkable promotional blitzkrieg that culminates in the phone’s release June 29.

“There has never been a massively successful consumer device based solely on a touch screen,” warned Sky Dayton, chief executive of Helio, a cellular network service that has recently introduced an innovative handset that integrates Google maps with a G.P.S. system and another feature that physically locates friends using Helio phones.

Palm was successful, he noted, despite requiring the Palm Pilot’s users to enter text with a stylus using its own writing system called Graffiti. But the company eventually retreated and put a mechanical keyboard on its Treo smartphones.

“Texting” is central to an entire generation of people, Mr. Dayton argued, and Apple is taking a risk in not making that a central design feature. “There is a generation of users who are always online and who don’t communicate the way their parents did,” he said. “They’re e-mailing; they’re texting; they’re I.M.-ing.”

To be sure, Apple has had its share of product design hits and misses both under Mr. Jobs’s command and while he was in exile from the computer maker from 1985 to 1997. The Apple III was a well-designed computer, but was undermined by shoddy manufacturing. Several years later, the Lisa, the first commercial PC with a graphical user interface, and an infamously poorly designed “Twiggy” floppy disk drive, generated excitement but failed commercially. More recently, the Apple Cube, which was perhaps Mr. Jobs’s most daring design statement, drew critical praise and few sales.

But the comparison that could haunt the iPhone most comes from the specter of a former Apple chief executive, John Sculley, and his Newton. Billed as the original “personal digital assistant,” the Newton relied on a stylus for entering text. When users fumbled with its character recognition system, the machine went from hype to humiliation.

Although a small team of dedicated Apple engineers ultimately improved the technology, it was too late to save the Newton as a product.

Few industrial designers believe that the iPhone will suffer the Newton’s fate. Indeed, many leading designers argue that even before the iPhone has reached the market, it has changed consumer electronics industry standards irrevocably. Dispensing with a physical keyboard has given software an increased importance over hardware in product design, said Mark Rolston, senior vice president at Frog Design, an industrial design consulting firm.

A result, he said, has been a richer conversation between Frog’s designers and customers because the software presents a much wider range of options for features. “This is great for us because the carriers weren’t listening,” Mr. Rolston said. “They were slightly adjusting the soft-keys.”

Overnight that has changed and that has resulted in significant new business for design companies like Frog. “We’re being engaged by many more customers with more aggressive ideas about what to do,” he said.

Mr. Rolston believes that Mr. Jobs will get away with his gamble. “They took a risk and it’s a bold step for the industry,” he said. “This is a worthwhile risk.”

Indeed, the handful of users outside Apple who have been able to play with the hand-held device report that the quirky company has made an important step forward in the art of controlling computer systems. It may teach a new generation of technology users to use their fingers rather than a mouse — a four-decade-old technology — as a pointing and command device.

Apple’s multitouch technology — which permits control gestures with one or more fingers or thumbs — and which is now also being explored by a variety of other companies, including Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and others, is a much more direct way to interact with a computer. Software designers have injected virtual “physics” into the user’s experience. For example, sliding a finger along the screen in a directory will cause the index to slide as if it were a piece of paper on a flat surface.

Mr. Jobs’s new phone may resonate with a new kind of mobile user, said Donald A. Norman, a product designer who is co-director of the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

“Apple says, ‘We’re not selling to the person who lives on his BlackBerry, we’re selling to the person who listens to music and surfs the Web,’ ” he said.

And even Mr. Jobs’s competitors are rooting for him to win.

“When I first saw iPhone I was very excited,” said Benjamin Bederson, co-founder and vice president for client technologies at ZenZui, a Seattle-based mobile phone software company, which is commercializing technologies that were developed at Microsoft’s research labs. “It will raise the expectations. I think that consumers have had the central assumption that cellphone experiences are terrible and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/te...one.ready.html





No iPhone SDK Means No Killer iPhone Apps
Jesus Diaz

According to Apple, "no software developer kit is required for the iPhone." However, the truth is that the lack of an SDK means that there won't be a killer application for the iPhone. It also means the iPhone's potential as an amazing computing and communication platform will never be realized. And because of this I don't think the iPhone will be as revolutionary as it could be. That's a real heart breaker.

Steve Jobs initially sold the iPhone as the Next Big Thing from Apple, just like the Macintosh was. The Macintosh really broke the mold. While not as groundbreaking, the iPhone is an intelligent and clean implementation of existing things. Really intelligent, really clean, like the Mac. Unlike the original Mac, however, developers won't have full access to its core features. Without them there won't be the equivalent of PageMaker, Photoshop, Word or Premiere in the iPhone, powerful applications taking full advantage of the unique capabilities of the hardware, the operating system and its frameworks.

Those applications spawned two revolutions: desktop publishing (including photo editing) and desktop video. It was the Mac and its third-party apps that brought radical changes that have deeply affected us, not the Mac alone.

On the iPhone, however, developers will be limited to developing Web applications based on AJAX, a set of Internet standards that make software like GMail, Google Maps or FaceBook possible. The iPhone is the real thing, a complete UNIX-to-go with stunning graphic classes, and developers will be limited to do stuff like this.

Mind you, AJAX is great for what it does on the Web today, but is limited. All we know is this, from the press release:
Developers can create Web 2.0 applications which look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and which can seamlessly access iPhone's services, including making a phone call, sending an email and displaying a location in Google Maps.

This is nothing new, however. We knew this from the very beginning because iPhone's Safari was already doing it. It's called auto-detection of phone numbers and addresses: you click on a phone or address in your web page and it gets passed by Safari to the operating system, which calls the number or shows the address in the Google Maps app. In other words, they are trying to sell us the same thing we already had when the iPhone was introduced and the same thing we already have in Mac OS X's Safari.

So unless they show something boomtastic in the sessions, this will not change. To see how powerful AJAX applications on the iPhone could be, a million questions will have to be answered this week. Questions like:

- Would I be able to access the iPhone databases from Safari and query them from my AJAX application? Looking at Jobs' stress on security, it doesn't look like this will be possible.

- Would I be able store data locally beyond cookies? Probably the same answer.

- How will these application perform over limited EDGE connections? Will I have to do a painful download for the whole app, instead of just the data?

- How will the connection limit the interactive possibilities?

- How is the access to iPhone's hardware? Would I be able to access iPhone's hardware to connect to an infrared scanner via Bluetooth and create an amazing sales or logistics application? How about Multitouch?

If AJAX is that good and the developers don't need an SDK, why has Apple built a dedicated Mail application or Google Maps software into the iPhone? Why not just reformat the CSS on the Web and open a special view to .Mac mail, Gmail or Google Maps made just for iPhone Safari users ?

Maybe because to do the cool stuff that iPhone's Maps do, you need to access all the cool Mac OS X classes that iPhones have.

Now, I'm sure that there will be great AJAX applications created for the iPhone, specially at the corporate level, like in the Keynote Demo. But what is important here is that we won't have sexy apps. This is what Apple needs to make the iPhone not just great, but huge. A true revolutionary product. Otherwise, we will keep asking where are we going to find the killer apps that made the Mac what is today; where is the next Delicious Library-equivalent for the iPhone; where are the games. Just think about those, as Apple stresses its relationship with EA and id software. There's a great potential for games in the iPhone, which with multi-touch could be a Nintendo DS 2.0 in the making. As Nintendo fans will tell you, a Flash game (which provides with even better flexibility than AJAX) is not a substitute for a real Wii game. And the next big games never come from the established big developers who may, at the end, be the only ones with access to the secret iPhone SDK at use in Apple.

So no SDK == no access to iPhone's cool frameworks == no revolutionary apps, no real new concepts coming from third-parties, no eye candy available for anyone but Apple and no possibility for some really crazy games that will fully exploit the graphic and multi-touch power of the iPhone.

In other words

[12:37AM 6/12/07, Edited by B.Lam.]

Update 10:00AM PST 6/12/07 Think Secret is speculating that, with full support for Google Apps in Safari 3, the iPhone may also have access to Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Many will say that this solves one of the main concerns about the iPhone's viability as a business platform, despite the lack of an SDK to make specialized applications.

However, and even assuming that these could be viable alternatives to potential users looking for both complete Word and Excel viewing and light editing, Google Apps are hardly the killer applications I am talking about in this article. They are just current (and blah) productivity software that will not take advantage of the iPhone's unique features. –Jesus Diaz
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/fast-and-...pps-267899.php





Unlocked iPhones a Reality Through Pure Digital?
Jacqui Cheng

Unlocked iPhones are going to be a major commodity once the iPhone finally gets released. Although no one is exactly sure of the "SIM card situation" (whether you will be able to change one out), everyone seems to be optimistic that there will still be some way to do so.

That's why when pro blogger and PodTech VP Robert Scoble pointed out that Pure Mobile is prepping to resell unlocked versions of the iPhone, my interest was piqued. The company claims on its iPhone web page that it will sell both 4GB and 8GB versions of the phone that will not be restricted to AT&T/Cingular; this would make the phones compatible with most major GSM carriers in North America, such as T-Mobile, Fido, and Rogers.

Pricing for the unlocked phones is, predictably, not available right now. However, we can reasonably expect that the phones will most likely go for a premium. The company told Scoble that they expect not to be able to meet demand upon the iPhone's launch, because demand is currently "off the scale" compared to any other product they've dealt with yet. The only prices currently listed on the site are shipping rates ($29 and $19 for Priority and Economy shipping, respectively).

If Pure Digital is truly selling unlocked iPhones, then I can see a great many users being interested in buying one through them, including me. Of course, features like visual voicemail won't be compatible with most other carriers, but just the freedom to be able to use it outside of AT&T will be good enough for most of us. We'll see soon enough whether the company is actually successful at doing what we all are hoping they can do.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/appl...h-pure-digital





Apple's Latest Trick to Enforce Digital Rights
Scott Shuey

One day. That's how long it took iTunes users to dismantle Apple's latest attempt to enforce Digital Rights Management (DRM) software.

DRM limits where and how your music can be played and has recently been under fire from consumers. Most iPod users have long known how to break Apple's DRM software. The process is known as download-burn-rip.

The name gets no points for creativity, but it's apt enough. Download a DRM-protected song, burn it to CD, and rip that CD to your computer. You now have an unprotected MP3 file, ready to be uploaded to the player (or file-sharing network) of your choice.

Technically, it's not even hacking. No law has been broken and no illegal process used. Apple could cry foul that the end user license agreement (EULA) - it's that box you mindlessly click without reading - has been violated, but so far Apple hasn't seemed inclined to engage its customers in lawsuits. Most music companies seem to have realised that suing your customers doesn't do much to increase sales.

But Apple tried to circumvent this well-established procedure with version 7.2, the same version that Apple released to play newly offered and much-hyped DRM-free songs.

With this version of iTunes, users were finding that music subjected to the old download-burn-rip would no longer load onto their iPods.

Ironically, Apple is now heftily promoting DRM-free that lets you play your music anywhere, and then prevents you from removing DRM protection. I didn't realise that it was possible to talk out of both sides of your mouth simultaneously.

iTunes users refused to take the "bug", as Apple labelled it, laying down. Within 24 hours, websites that gave full instructions on how to "fix" the problem on OSX, XP, and Vista began to appear. It's hard to find that kind of technical support from anyone today, let along pirates.

User information

Within days of this blunder, Apple was again called out for monkeying with the music.

Turns out that Apple has been embedding its files with user information. iTunes customers have been downloading files that contain both their names and their email address.

How long this has been going on and just why Apple has felt compelled to do so is still a mystery - the company so far has refused to comment - but the reason seems obvious.

The embedded data won't prevent anyone from listening to their music files, but it might deter them from uploading them to a file-sharing server.

The data is unencrypted, so uploading a file to LimeWire will be like writing your name and number on a bathroom wall. Who would do something so stupid? No one, that's the point.

But the message is clear: take our songs public, and we'll take you public.

This tactic will probably not help Apple in the long run. Defenders of the data claim there are legitimate uses for the data "water mark".

Certain iTunes features use the data to promote other music on the site. OK, fine, but then encrypt the data. Things happen. iPods get stolen, and once personal information is released on a file-sharing server, there's no getting it back.

No one so far has figured out how to remove or alter the embedded data in the tracks, yet, but the stopwatch is running. Give it a day.
http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles.../10131156.html





Awaiting Real Sales From Virtual Shoppers
Bob Tedeschi

THE seven million or so inhabitants of Second Life, the three-dimensional online world, have spent millions of dollars on digital makeovers, clothing and other goods and services for their avatars.

But will the game’s players buy anything for themselves?

Retailers and manufacturers like Reebok, Adidas, American Apparel and 1-800Flowers.com are setting up shop in Second Life, hoping that users will steer their avatars to these stores and buy goods to deliver to their real world addresses. So far, retailers say they have low expectations for their efforts, but some believe that the experiments could yield important lessons on how people might operate in the online realm.

“What we’re doing reminds me of the early days of the online world,” said Christopher G. McCann, president of 1-800-Flowers.com. “The first site we launched in 1995 was in 3-D, because I said people wouldn’t want just two-dimensional photos. Here we are, 12 years later, back into this virtual world.”

The company’s Second Life initiative, which rolled out last week, is in a brick greenhouse bearing the company logo. There, users may browse various plants and cut flowers, including a collection of “Happy Hour” bouquets arranged to resemble cocktails. Avatars may take a free floral arrangement, or users may also click from the game’s 1-800-Flowers.com store to the company’s Web site to buy one directly.

Mr. McCann said that he expected to distribute more virtual bouquets than real ones. “This is more about relationship building for us right now, and exposing our brand,” he said.

The opening of virtual stores in Second Life raises interesting questions as virtual worlds mesh elements of both e-commerce and bricks-and-mortar retailing. How, for instance, does a company market itself?

As with many companies that opened stores in Second Life, 1-800-Flowers.com contracted an outside vendor. That developer, This Second Marketing, which is based in San Francisco, created avatars wearing 1-800-Flowers.com T-shirts. The team trolled popular areas of Second Life handing out virtual fliers about the greenhouse.

The team interacted with about 1,600 people in 60 hours, according to Joni West, president of This Second Marketing. In the first three days the greenhouse was open, it had more than 900 visitors, she said.

Joseph Laszlo an analyst with the online consulting firm Jupiter Research, said that building a store on Second Life will not come easily to many online merchants. “You actually have to think more like a bricks-and-mortar retailer than a virtual retailer,” he said.

Mr. Laszlo said retailers must still consider such things as store layout, shelf space and ways to help users find an item.

Location can also matter, but not as much as in the physical world. Rather than walk aimlessly through Second Life, people tend to navigate the realm by searching for specific services or landmarks in the search box and transporting themselves directly there.

One of the more successful commercial applications within Second Life has been Reebok’s virtual store, where users may create custom versions of Reebok shoes for their avatars, and for themselves.

According to Benjamin James, who leads the San Francisco office of Rivers Run Red, the agency that created Reebok’s Second Life store, the site distributed more than 27,000 pairs of digital shoes in its first 10 weeks.

Mr. James said he did not know how many of those people clicked through to Reebok’s Web site to buy physical reproductions of their avatars’ shoes, but he said the effort, which began in October, was indeed helping to sell the real items. “This allowed people to get comfortable with their product in the virtual world,” he said.

Other Second Life retailers said they had not seen results in their stores.

“I’m not really sold on it yet,” said Raz Schionning, who oversaw American Apparel’s entry into Second Life last year. Mr. Schionning said the store, allows people to buy digital versions of the company’s clothes, and also click over to AmericanApparel.net to buy the real items.

Mr. Schionning said he could not comment on the level of sales that have come from the company’s Second Life store, but he indicated that the numbers were quite small.

“The user interface is not particularly intuitive,” he said. “It took me a while to figure out how to buy something.”

One problem with selling on Second Life, Mr. Schionning said, is that it is so new that retailers have not come to a consensus on how to do it. As a result, buyers are not sure how to approach a transaction. “We’ve all become accustomed to how an e-commerce site works,” he said, “but on Second Life, those conventions haven’t really been established.”

“It’s not unlike the way it was on the Web initially,” Mr. Schionning added. “So there might actually be an advantage to waiting and watching to see what happens.”

Either way, the sudden popularity of three-dimensional virtual spaces online suggests that consumers are ready for that sort of experience even if retailers are not. Mr. Schionning, for one, says they will have to be ready soon.

“There’s a gap between the current online shopping experience and the next generation,” he said. “A virtual world can at least bring you closer to the store experience without actually bringing you there. I’m not convinced Second Life is that answer, but it is a step along the path.”

In the meantime, Linden Lab, the privately held San Francisco developer of Second Life, is enjoying the increased attention from businesses.

The company does not earn a commission on sales made on the site, but it charges rent to developers who want to create customized spaces on the service. Companies can lease a 65,000-square-meter parcel for $200 a month. But to develop that land, businesses typically pay technology companies between $100,000 and $5 million, industry executives said.

According to Christopher Mahoney, Linden Lab’s business development manager, the company has in recent months experienced a spike in interest from software developers. Those developers, he predicted, will be able to deliver photo-realistic renderings of offline stores and merchandise in the next five years.

“Imagine taking an avatar and walking around a house, painting the walls dynamically and furnishing it with products from Pottery Barn or Ikea,” he said. “There’ll be a point when a 3-D Internet solves problems in your real world.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/business/11ecom.html





Wired to Sell
Lisa Keys

WHEN Parimal Pandya, a 32-year-old network consultant at AT&T, walked into the sales office at Liberty Harbor, a mixed-use waterfront development going up in Jersey City, the sales agent launched into a standard pitch: the layouts, the finishes, the amenities.

Mr. Pandya wasn’t listening. “I’m thinking, ‘I’ve heard this a million times,’ ” he said. “Then I notice the blinds going up and down, and I think: ‘Who’s controlling that? I want to know more about that.’ ”

What captured Mr. Pandya’s attention was the home automation system. Residents at Liberty Harbor — 10,000 in 250 buildings when the complex is fully built out in 10 or 15 years — will be able to do this from touch screens in their apartments or from any computer with Internet access, enabling them to make adjustments from miles away.

It may sound space age, but sophisticated smart-home technology is increasingly available and includes automation systems that allow residents to control lighting, raise and lower window shades and change a room’s climate, via computers. In many instances, they can manipulate a variety of audio and visual functions, allowing users to listen to different types of music in different rooms or transfer a movie from one plasma-screen television to another.

In apartment buildings, automation systems can link to concierge services, enabling residents to make restaurant reservations or reserve a Zipcar, without picking up a phone. Enhanced systems with integrated closed-circuit televisions allow residents to see what’s going on inside and outside their homes from another location. Such security applications provide convenience, too: diners can see if there’s s a line at the restaurant down the block, parents can receive text messages when their children arrive home and executives can admit repairmen to their homes via cellphone.

In some buildings residents can go online to see if there are washing machines available in the laundry room, or to monitor their off-site wine cellars and order up bottles.

This sort of technology may be most familiar to buyers of new houses in the suburbs, but it is now becoming the latest must-have amenity in condos at every price level that are being built in and around New York City.

At Liberty Harbor, smart-home technology is standard in all apartments, from the rentals and studios that start in the mid-$300,000s, up to the single-family town houses that cost as much as $1.6 million.

Mr. Pandya, who bought a two-bedroom apartment for $500,000, was so excited by the electronics that he said he forgot to consider anything else about the apartment. So despite leaving a deposit the day of his visit, he had to call the sales agent and ask for pictures of the kitchen and bathrooms.

“I didn’t know what the finishes looked like,” he said. “I figured it must have a kitchen for the price I paid.”

The plummeting cost of bandwidth — the amount of data that can be carried in a given amount of time — and of home technology components and an increase in the types of applications available are making electronic amenities much more common.

“Technology is the fourth utility,” said Herb Hauser, the president of Midtown Technologies in Manhattan, a company that designs and installs systems in new and existing apartments. “We wouldn’t move into a building that doesn’t have water or electricity. Within a relatively short period of time, we won’t move into an environment unless it has good information services.”

Call them “technomenities,” a term Mr. Hauser favors. In some cases, the technology is offered buildingwide. In others, the systems are available as optional add-ons, and they are usually showcased in model apartments to impress potential buyers.

“I think housing and technology are synonymous,” said Peter Mocco, the developer of Liberty Harbor. “The kinds of things that can be done with technology to enhance your quality of life are such that it’ll be like the transition from washboards to washer/dryers, from iceboxes to refrigerators.”

At an April open house in a model apartment at North8, a Toll Brothers building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, buyers checked out the spacious rear garden, they admired the white-oak floors, and they fiddled with the built-in iPod dock installed in a living room wall. Toll Brothers has offered some home-theater options in its suburban developments, but this is the first time it has included high-tech options like the iPod dock, which is part of an audio system that can broadcast music throughout the apartment.

“We wanted to demonstrate what people can do in terms of upgrades,” said David Von Spreckelsen, a vice president at Toll Brothers. “There was a really good response. Anyone who has been to that model really thinks it is a great idea. We’ll have to consider it in future projects.

“As there’s more and more product out there, and the competition is steeper and steeper, it’s something you can do to distinguish your project,” he added. “It shows really well — you hear it, you see it. When you walk into a model, it’s impressive.”

Shige Suzuki, the first person to buy an apartment at North8 after visiting the open house, chose a technological upgrade that cost about $7,000 and includes the iPod dock and a wireless touch screen that controls the speakers hidden in the walls, the lights and the heat and air-conditioning.

“I like clean and simple,” Mr. Suzuki, a 32-year-old brand manager, said in an e-mail message, noting that innovative technology was more common in homes in his native Japan. “I sometimes watch the celebrity show ‘Cribs’ on MTV. They have wonderful homes, but sometimes they show us messy wires and unprofessionally installed AV systems. I like wireless AV systems and invisible speakers.”

Happily for Mr. Suzuki, his preferences are becoming affordable enough for the noncelebrity market.

“The bar has risen in terms of people’s expectations of home entertainment systems,” said Cyrus Claffey, the president of Clareo Networks in Manhattan, the company that designed and installed the automation systems at North8. “With plummeting flat-screen TV pricing, advertising by Bose on TV, people’s expectations are completely different than they were five years ago.”

“No luxury developer would build a kitchen without a Sub-Zero fridge,” Mr. Claffey added. “It’s the same thing with technology. Our model is to align ourselves with real estate developers. Our goal is to help them sell units using technology.”

Other developments that have home automation systems include 995 Fifth Avenue, at 81st Street, once known as the Stanhope. Its touch screen will allow residents to control the heating and air-conditioning but also to make restaurant reservations and to ask the garage to deliver their cars.

At the Ikon, a condo rising at McCarren Park in Williamsburg, every apartment comes with a video intercom system that allows residents to communicate with the concierge. There are also optional upgrades, costing about $3,000 to about $18,000 or more, that include heating and air-conditioning controls, audio controls and a “nanny cam,” which allows parents to monitor what’s going on at home.

Though the technology may sound complicated, the operation is intuitive, users and designers insist. Most companies offer continuing support and service, and when things do break down, there are no moving parts to fix, they say.

As Mr. Hauser of Midtown Technologies put it: “It’s all application-based, which means that a problem is all inside the computer software. Correcting the problem is usually a matter of reloading the software or finding a virus. They’ll never have to tear up the wall — the plumbers will do far more damage to your walls.”

New technology is enabling new buildings to enhance their security systems, including keyless access, digital surveillance systems and in the not-too-distant future, biometrics, in which camera recognition of residents’ faces will be needed for entry.

“All the developers are doing this type of stuff,” said Jon Ecker, the president of Peace of Mind Technologies in Manhattan. “A lot of it ends up being a marketing solution and an amenity for prospective buyers and tenants. When they know there’s video intercom or card access, that’s looked at as a special feature of the building.”

Then there’s the wow factor that technomenities can provide. The Ritz-Carlton Residences in North Hills, on Long Island, will be chockablock with technological innovations, said Dan Pfeffer, the president of Midtown Equities, its developer.

Before his company begins a project, he said, he assembles his technologically savvy staff in his office. “We start by talking about things that bother them in their day-to-day lives,” he said. “We take these problems and try to create solutions.”

One such problem, Mr. Pfeffer said, is the seemingly interminable wait for the front gate to open — something that won’t happen at the new Ritz-Carlton. “There’s no reason to wait,” he said. “We’re going to give you a device, a chip, that goes in your car. As you get closer to the gate and enter the deceleration lane, it’ll judge your speed and open by the time you get there.”

Then, when residents enter that gate, the valet will automatically be notified. He or she will be there to meet them, along with the concierge, who will be ready to help with packages. As residents walk into the building, the elevator will waiting to whisk them to their floor, eliminating the need to push a button.

Such technology “differentiates our product from other products on the market,” Mr. Pfeffer said. “It’s not just about what the place looks like anymore. As developers, we spend a lot of time designing our units. I’d say we spend almost as much time now designing the technology that goes into our properties.”

The same goes for sales centers, which are increasingly high-tech, too. The soon-to-open sales center for the Ritz-Carlton in North Hills, for example, “has the ability to adjust the rooms based upon who you are and what you like — the style of music, the temperature, the lighting,” Mr. Pfeffer said. In the model’s media room, a single male may find baseball games and high volume, and older couples may get softer lighting and old movies.

Technology can also power special features, like the off-site wine storage available at the Element, a condo rising on West 59th Street. Residents will get a password to allow them access to a virtual cellar; they can buy wine online, request delivery and see real-time calculations of their “liquid net worth.”

And at the Archstone-Clinton, a rental building on West 52nd Street, a high-tech laundry room allows residents to log on to a Web site to see if a washing machine is available; it will also send an e-mail or text message when their washer or dryer has stopped. (When residents log on, the machines being used are shown in red and even vibrate a bit.)

Though technology like this may seem up-to-the-minute and urban, it actually grew out of a suburban phenomenon. “The trend started in stand-alone homes,” said Kunal Shah, the vice president for strategy and sales at Clareo Networks. “We found that when baby boomers sell their suburban homes, they want the same things they had there, here.”

That was a big selling point for Mr. Pandya, the buyer at Liberty Harbor, whose current home in Princeton, N.J., is tricked out with a remote-access climate control system he installed himself, multiple plasma-screen TV sets and digital picture frames, which are connected to the Internet and can be automatically updated with new pictures from friends and family. “I’ll have suburban convenience with an urban lifestyle,” he said. “I want to be a New Yorker, but I still want to have my toys.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/realestate/10cov.html





Are Computer Keyboards Dishwasher Safe?
Nell Boyce

Studies show that computer keyboards have more bacteria than toilet seats. But it's hard to clean all those keys. So some people advocate an extreme solution: Throw your keyboard in your dishwasher.

At first glance, this seems insane. But the computer-keyboard-in-the-dishwasher advice is all over the Internet. And don't we wish it were true? My keyboard is an old Hewlett Packard that's encrusted with a kind of mysterious black grime. I thought, "Well, why not try my KitchenAid?'"

I ran the experiment one night. I put the keyboard on the top rack, cord and all, key-side down. I used a little soap, and hit "normal wash." (I didn't want to pots 'n' pans it.)

I was encouraged to do this by Scott Moschella, a computer guy who runs a blog called Plastic Bugs.

"I think now when you type 'keyboard' and 'dishwasher' into Google, my site comes up as one of the first results," Moschella says. "Clearly, you know, all it takes is one geek to do something stupid, and you've got a whole bunch of lemmings who are willing to jump off a cliff with you."

His keyboard came with his beloved first Mac computer. It was one of those stylish keyboards made of transparent plastic. You could see the grime inside, and it was getting unbearably gross and sticky.

"I didn't want to throw away my keyboard," laments Moschella. "It was perfect — until the beer got spilled in it."

That's when one of his friends said, "Hey, why don't you just use the dishwasher?" Moschella found the idea oddly compelling.

"He said it as if I should have known, and it's something he had done before," Moschella said. "He had never, never done it. But he had that authoritative voice as some geeks get, where you want to believe."

Moschella had nothing to lose. So, like me, he put his keyboard in and waited.

He says it was an excruciating wait. I felt the same way as my dishwasher glugged and groaned. Finally, it quieted down and I heard a hiss as the drying cycle started. Moschella had suggested that the heat might not be a good thing, so I opened the door. Steam came out. My keyboard felt almost too hot to touch. It was dripping water. It was also absolutely spotless.

But forget how it looks. According to Microsoft's Sean Butterworth, I had just made a big mistake.

"We do not recommend putting our keyboards, or any keyboards for that matter, in the dishwasher," he says. "What will cause the problems first, is the short-circuiting in the wiring."

Butterworth should know. At Microsoft's hardware division, people check out every possible thing that might harm a keyboard.

"We test with everything from cracker crumbs, salt and pepper, hair," he explains. "We even create a special solution we call artificial sweat."

They have also submerged keyboards in plain water.

"And that gets you relatively close to what it would be like if you put it through the dishwasher," Butterworth says. "And typically that makes most keyboards lose functionality."

Other major manufacturers have the same party line. Robert Gulino, with Logitech, told me I could wipe the surface gently with a damp cloth. Or, blow out dust with a little can of compressed air.

"But, you know, in terms of washing it, we certainly don't recommend that," Gulino says. "If you did want to be able to do that, it would have to be a very different keyboard. The electrical components inside would have to be encased in membranes. But we just don't do that."

A few companies do. In fact, a Florida company called Seal Shield makes keyboards that are "dishwasher safe." It says so right on the box.

Brad Whitchurch says water is no problem.

"We have about a nine-foot cord, and I've taken it down to the bottom of a swimming pool, and it worked fine," Whitchurch says, explaining that he left the monitor and the actual computer on the side of the pool, of course. He typed in "The Seal Shield keyboard works when wet."

It really does — I tried it in my bathtub!

The company mainly sells these keyboards to hospitals, where cleanliness is a life or death matter — even though studies have shown that just wiping down a keyboard with disinfectant can do the trick. You too can buy this waterproof keyboard — if you're willing to pay about $50.

I was just hoping my keyboard wouldn't have to be replaced. After its ordeal in the dishwasher, I let it air dry for a week. Then I plugged it in and started to type. I tested the space bar, the return key, all the numbers and letters. It seemed perfect.
Still, my fellow washers, like Scott Moschella, point out that we may never really know. His Mac keyboard also seems fine, he says, but "honestly, there are some keys that I haven't ever hit, like the F6 key. I don't really know if that key works."

For him, it's good enough. But he says if you've got a fancy keyboard, with all kinds of bells and whistles you can't live without, you may not want to try this one at home.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...oryId=11029793





Yahoo's China Policy Rejected
BBC

Yahoo shareholders have rejected plans for the company to adopt a policy that opposes censorship on the internet.

Proposals to set up a human rights committee which would review its policies around the world, specifically China, were also heavily defeated.

Yahoo has been criticized by human rights groups since 2005 for its role in turning over some political dissidents' e-mails.

The materials were used to prosecute and imprison them.

But Yahoo insists it must comply with local laws in areas where it operates.

De-listed sites

At the company's annual general meeting, the censorship proposal won only about 15% of support while only 4% backed the idea of a human rights committee.

Last year, Human Rights Watch, a New York based campaign group, accused Yahoo, Google and Microsoft for "carrying out censorship for the Chinese government".

Whole websites - including media sources - are eliminated from Yahoo and Google in China.

De-listed sites are skipped over when the search engine trawls the web for results.

Neither Yahoo nor any other company has released a list of websites that have been de-listed for their political and religious content.

The internet firms argue it is better to offer Chinese users some information than none at all.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ss/6747095.stm





Watchdog Group Slams Google on Privacy
Michael Liedtke

Google Inc.'s privacy practices are the worst among the Internet's top destinations, according to a watchdog group seeking to intensify the recent focus on how the online search leader handles personal information about its users.

In a report released Saturday, London-based Privacy International assigned Google its lowest possible grade. The category is reserved for companies with "comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy."

None of the 22 other surveyed companies -- a group that included Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and AOL -- sunk to that level, according to Privacy International.

While a number of other Internet companies have troubling policies, none comes as close to Google to "achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy," Privacy International said in an explanation of its findings.

In a statement from one of its lawyers, Google said it aggressively protects its users' privacy and stands behind its track record. In its most conspicuous defense of user privacy, Google last year successfully fought a U.S. Justice Department subpoena demanding to review millions of search requests.

"We are disappointed with Privacy International's report, which is based on numerous inaccuracies and misunderstandings about our services," said Nicole Wong, Google's deputy general counsel.

"It's a shame that Privacy International decided to publish its report before we had an opportunity to discuss our privacy practices with them."

Privacy International contacted Google earlier this month, but didn't receive a response, said Simon Davies, the group's director.

The scathing report is just the latest strike aimed at Google's privacy practices.

An independent European panel recently opened an inquiry into whether Google's policies abide by Europe's privacy rules.

Meanwhile, three consumer groups in the United States are pressuring the nation's regulators to make Google change some of its privacy policies as part of its proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of online ad service DoubleClick Inc., which also tracks Web surfers' behavior.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is looking into antitrust concerns raised by the DoubleClick deal, but has not indicated if privacy issues will be part of the inquiry.

Hoping to placate its critics, Google has pledged to begin erasing the information about users' search requests within 18 to 24 months.

The company says its stockpiles data to help its search engine better understand its users so it can deliver more relevant results and advertisements.

As Google becomes more knowledgeable about the people relying on its search engine and other free services, management hopes to develop more tools that recommend activities and other pursuits that might appeal to individual users.

Privacy International is particularly troubled by Google's ability to match data gathered by its search engine with information collected from other services such as e-mail, instant messaging and maps.

"Under the microscope, it turns out that Google is doing much more with our data than we ever imagined," Davies said.

Founded in 1990, Privacy International said it reached its preliminary findings after spending the past six months reviewing Internet privacy practices with the help of about 30 professors, mostly in the United States and United Kingdom. The group plans to update the report in September.

Seven of the Internet companies and Web sites included in Privacy International's analysis received the second lowest grade of "substantial and comprehensive privacy threats." This group included: Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, Apple Inc., Facebook.com, Hi5.com, Reunion.com, Microsoft's Windows Live Space and Yahoo.

None of the companies or sites received Privacy International's top grade, but five rated as "generally privacy-aware." They were: BBC, eBay Inc., Last.fm, LiveJournal.com, and Wikipedia.com.
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/2007...le-privacy.htm





Google to Cut Back on How Long it Keeps Search History
Thomas Crampton

Faced with criticism from privacy activists and questions from the European Union, Google announced Tuesday that it would cut back on how long it keeps the Web search histories of users, to 18 months from 24.

Search information will now be made anonymous after a year and a half, the company said in a letter addressed to an EU privacy watchdog, the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, and posted on the company's Web site.

The information, which is gathered every time a user searches the Internet using Google, gives information about the searcher's tastes and interests. Google shares general information on search trends, but says it does not release this personal information outside the company.

"We believe we can still address our legitimate interests in security, innovation and anti-fraud efforts with this shorter period," Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, wrote in the letter, adding that the company would "firmly reject" a retention period that was any shorter.

Fleischer said the company faced a great lack of legal clarity, with some of its services potentially falling under EU data retention rules that require companies to keep some records of electronic communication for up to 24 months.

The move was part of an exchange that Google had initiated with the European Union working party to clarify privacy issues.

Fleischer said that Google had been working to balance conflicting considerations in a zone where the industry, so far, has taken little action.

"We looked at what other companies in the industry do, and we were not able to find explicit and clear privacy policies," Fleischer said. "Google is a leader in our industry and it is appropriate for us to be taking this leading role."

Google is committed to following U.S. law and following EU data protection principles, Fleischer said in the letter. He added that there were many gray areas of how to deal with privacy issues.

"There is no single right answer to the question of how long server logs should be retained," Fleischer said in the letter.

"Retention of logs data is critical to our ability to operate and improve our services and to provide adequate security for our users."

Analyzing of log data is necessary for engineers to refine search quality to place the most clicked results at the top and build new services, the company said.

One such service from Google is its Spell Checker, which automatically looks at a query to see if the searcher has employed the most common spelling of a word. If a greater number of search results is generated by an alternative spelling, it will ask if the searcher really meant to use that other spelling.

The reduction in time that the world's leading search engine retains data comes days after Privacy International, a group advocating the privacy issue, gave Google the lowest privacy protection rating of all major Internet properties.

"We were disappointed with the report because it is full of numerous inaccuracies," Fleischer said Tuesday.

"Google is open to an ongoing dialogue with privacy and people interested in thoughtful reflection on these issues," he said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/...ess/google.php





Gravy train

Exclusive: Office of Nation's Top Spy Inadvertently Reveals Key to Classified National Intel Budget
R. J. Hillhouse

In a holdover from the Cold War when the number really did matter to national security, the size of the US national intelligence budget remains one of the government's most closely guarded secrets. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the highest intelligence agency in the country that oversees all federal intelligence agencies, appears to have inadvertently released the keys to that number in an unclassified PowerPoint presentation now posted on the website of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). By reverse engineering the numbers in an underlying data element embedded in the presentation, it seems that the total budget of the 16 US intelligence agencies in fiscal year 2005 was $60 billion, almost 25% higher than previously believed.

In the presentation originally made to a DIA conference in Colorado on May 14, Terri Everett, an Office of the Director of National Intelligence senior procurement executive, revealed that 70% of the total Intelligence Community budget is spent on contractors. (This was reported by Tim Shorrock on Salon.com.) Everett also included a slide depicting the trend of award dollars to contractors by the Intelligence Community from fiscal year 95 through a partial year of fiscal year 06 (i.e. through August 31st of FY06.) Because these figures are classified, a scale of the total number of award dollars was omitted from the Y-axis of the bar chart. The PowerPoint presentation was first obtained by Shorrock for Salon.com and it was later posted on the DIA's website where I downloaded it. Although it would not have been visible to the conference attendees, the data underlying the bar graph--the total amount of Intelligence Community funds spent on contractors--is readily available in the actual presentation. By double clicking on the bar chart, a small spreadsheet with the raw classified data appears:

(To view this spreadsheet in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's actual PowerPoint presentation, make sure you are opening the presentation in the PowerPoint program and not a web browser, view slide #11 and, depending upon your version of PowerPoint, making sure you're not on the 9/11 image object double-click on the chart or right click on it and choose Chart Object/Open.)

Here are the dollar amounts in tens of millions spent by the US Intelligence Community on contractors, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as embedded in the spreadsheet data underlying the bar graph (pictured above):

Note: FY06 data as of 31 August. (The numbers are in tens of millions of dollars, although this is not noted, but it is previously known that the amount spent on contracts is a double-digit billion plus dollar figure.)

This 70% of the Intelligence Community budget spent on contractors most likely includes all Intelligence Community direct acquisitions from contractors, including satellites and other very expensive hardware programs as well as more mundane supplies in addition to contracted services--(e.g. "green badgers" or staff contracted to the CIA.) The remaining 30% of the Intelligence Community budget most likely includes both personnel (i.e., civilian federal employee) and as well as intergovernmental operations and maintenance and supplies (e.g. payments by some Intelligence Community elements to GSA to lease office space and acquire government pens and office supplies.) By taking the 70% of the intelligence community budget that now goes to contractors in conjunction with the actual dollars spent on contractors, it is possible to reverse-engineer the budget using simple algebra.

This top line $60 billion figure is 25% above the estimated $48 billion budget for FY 08. It is quite probable that this total figure was not even known by the government until recently. Greater control and oversight of the Intelligence Community budget was a hallmark of the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004 that created the position of the Director of National Intelligence and gave it the mandate to get an overview of the entire amount spent on intelligence government-wide. To this end, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has recently gathered all parts of the previously fragmented Intelligence Community budget together for the first time as part of its Intelligence Resource Information System (IRIS). In the report from the Select Senate Committee on Intelligence released last Thursday, the committee praised the Office of the Director of Intelligence for creating a "single budget system called the Intelligence Resource Information System." It also recognizes their efforts in helping create what "will be used for further inquiry by the Committee’s budget and audit staffs and will be a baseline that allows the Congress and DNI to derive trend data from future reports."

Earlier, lower estimates were most likely only included what fell directly under the Director of Central Intelligence and which would have omitted parts of NSA, NRO. A total Intelligence Community number, with the Intelligence Community as defined by 50 U.S.C. 401a(4), would also now include the various military intelligence services (e.g. Army Intel, Navy Intel, etc.), each with its respective weapon technology intelligence exploitation shop. A total budget would also include a large portion of the budget of the Department of Homeland Security which was previously fragment across multiple government agencies. A $60 billion government-wide Intelligence Community budget is not at all out of line with the post 9/11 organizational reality. It seems that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is just now getting a clear picture of the fragmented intelligence community budget.

The overall Intelligence Community budget has long been a well kept secret and this classification did once have relevance when a large shift in the budget could have indicated to the Soviets an addition or cancellation of a major defense program. Now that our greatest adversaries are stateless entities that run on a shoestring budget and strike soft targets, signals of changes in high-dollar defense systems hardly seem worth hiding. Nonetheless, the federal government has frequently gone to court to keep the amount of the national intelligence budget secret. Only the budgets for 1963, 1997 and 1998 have been officially revealed, largely in response to FOIA lawsuits. And in 2005 a US News reporter picked up an apparent slip of the tongue by an official of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence at a conference when it was stated the national intel budget was $44 billion, but it was not clear which fiscal year this was in reference to and the DNI refused to confirm if the figure was accurate or the release accidental. At this time, they would not have had total dollar figures through the new IRIS system. But with such a staggering budget, it does seem that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence would be well advised to find some room in the Intelligence Community budget for a staff training on PowerPoint and OPSEC.
http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/the...ive_offic.html





Court Says Military Cannot Hold 'Enemy Combatant'
Adam Liptak

In a stinging rejection of one of the Bush administration’s central assertions about the scope of executive authority to combat terrorism, a federal appeals court ordered the Pentagon to release a man being held as an enemy combatant.

“To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians," Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote, “even if the President calls them ‘enemy combatants,’ would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution — and the country.”

“We refuse to recognize a claim to power,” Judge Motz added, “that would so alter the constitutional foundations of our Republic.”

The ruling was handed down by a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., in the case of Ali al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar and the only person on the American mainland known to be held as an enemy combatant.

Mr. Marri, whom the government calls a sleeper agent for Al Qaeda, was arrested on Dec. 12, 2001, in Peoria, Ill., where he was living with his family and studying computer science at Bradley University.

He has been held for the last four years at the Navy Brig in Charleston, S.C.

Judge Motz wrote that Mr. Marri may well be guilty of serious crimes. But she said that the government cannot circumvent the civilian criminal justice system through military detention.

Mr. Marri was charged with credit-card fraud and lying to federal agents after his arrest in 2001, and he was on the verge of a trial on those charges when he was moved into military detention in 2003.

The government contended, in a partly declassified declaration from a senior defense intelligence official, Jeffrey N. Rapp, that Mr. Marri was a Qaeda sleeper agent sent to the United States to commit mass murder and disrupt the banking system.

Two other men have been held as enemy combatants on the American mainland since the Sept. 11 attacks. One, Yaser Hamdi, was freed and sent to Saudi Arabia after the United States Supreme Court allowed him to challenge his detention in 2004.

The other, Jose Padilla, was transferred to the criminal justice system last year just as the Supreme Court was considering whether to review his case. He is now on trial on terrorism charges in federal court in Miami.

The decision does not appear to affect the rights of men held at the American naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Judge Motz stressed that the court analysis was limited to those who have substantial connections to the United States and are seized and detained within its borders.

A dissenting judge in today’s decision, Henry E. Hudson, visiting from the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, wrote that President Bush “had the authority to detain al-Marri as an enemy combatant or belligerent” because “he is the type of stealth warrior used by Al Qaeda to perpetrate terrorist acts against the United States.”

Jonathan Hafetz, the litigation director of the Liberty and National Security Project of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law and one of Mr. Marri’s lawyers, said of the court’s decision: “This is landmark victory for the rule of law and a defeat for unchecked executive power. It affirms the basic constitutional rights of all individuals — citizens and immigrants - in the United States.”

Writing for the majority, Judge Motz ordered the trial judge in the case to issue a writ of habeas corpus directing the Pentagon “within a reasonable period of time” to do one of several things with Mr. Marri. He may be charged in the civilian court system; he may be deported; or he may be held as a material witness; or he may be released.

“But military detention of al-Marri,” Judge Motz wrote, “must cease.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/wa...batant.html?hp





Activist 'Plane Spotters' Try Documenting Aero Flights
Thomasi McDonald

Laura Marks stood before a group of about 20 people alongside U.S. 70 on Saturday and gave them a brief lesson on how to spot planes coming and going from nearby Johnston County Airport.

"Look for the tail number. Be able to identify the type of plane. Use your scanner. Any information you can get will be great," Marks told the group, many of whom had cameras and binoculars dangling from around their necks.

"Piddle around with the scanner," Marks brightly added. "Get to know it. Have fun with it."

For Marks, of Ayden, and the rest of the group, the Saturday afternoon plane spotting lesson was not a leisurely activity. Marks and her cohort, volunteers with N.C. Stop Torture Now, hope to glean information that can be passed along to other groups around the world that want to stop the use of planes they say are used by the CIA to whisk away terror suspects to countries where they can be legally tortured.

The owner of the planes, Aero Contractors, a private flight company at the airport, has drawn national and international attention over the past year because of reported ties to the CIA.

Company officials were unavailable for comment Saturday.

For two years, N.C. Stop Torture Now activists have tried to hold Aero accountable for what they describe as human rights abuses by gathering thousands of petition signatures, making formal appeals to government officials, lobbying for state and federal legislation and civil disobedience.

"We have been going at this for some time, pursuing it from every level we can," said Roger Ehrlich, another volunteer and organizer of the plane-spotting lesson.

But Saturday was the group's first go at plane spotting. The group plans to make it a regular activity but, in cloak-and-dagger style, won't disclose when.

Before settling about 500 yards from the airport, the volunteers put up a banner that read, "First In Flight, Not In Torture." A smaller sign read, "Tarheels Against Torture" while another asked, "Who Would Jesus Torture?"

The signs prompted some motorists to yell things like "Go home Yankees!" and profanities.

Large vultures flew over the runway as Marks continued her lesson.

"That seems appropriate," Ehrlich said.

The group does not think any terror suspects are flown out of Johnston County. Instead, they think the flights most likely depart for Washington Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Va., to pick up CIA operatives. From there, they think, the planes head around the globe to snatch terror suspects before taking them to places where torture is legal, or to secret jails run by the CIA in places like Poland and Romania.

Marks handed out a brochure, "Torture Flight Watch Orientation," that instructed volunteers to keep an eye out for any plane movement around certain hangars.

But spotting planes trolling for the CIA in Johnston County may be about as easy as catching Osama bin Laden.

After nearly four hours in stifling heat waiting for a Gulfstream jet or some other suspicious aircraft, the volunteers spotted a small cropduster taxiing on one of the runways.

The members grew silent. Some peered through binoculars that turned upward as the plane took to the skies.

"He came in kind of low," Mia Austin Scoggins, the group's media director, said later. "I thought he was trying to intimidate us."
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/598587.html





Don't Try This at Home

Garage chemistry used to be a rite of passage for geeky kids. But in their search for terrorist cells and meth labs, authorities are making a federal case out of DIY science.
Steve Silberman

The first startling thing Joy White saw out of her bedroom window was a man running toward her door with an M16. White’s husband, a physicist named Bob Lazar, was already outside, awakened by their barking dogs. Suddenly police officers and men in camouflage swarmed up the path, hoisting a battering ram. “Come out with your hands up immediately, Miss White!” one of them yelled through a megaphone, while another handcuffed the physicist in his underwear. Recalling that June morning in 2003, Lazar says, “If they were expecting to find Osama bin Laden, they brought along enough guys.”

The target of this operation, which involved more than two dozen police officers and federal agents, was not an international terrorist ring but the couple’s home business, United Nuclear Scientific Supplies, a mail-order outfit that serves amateur scientists, students, teachers, and law enforcement professionals. From the outside, company headquarters – at the end of a dirt road high in the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque – looks like any other ranch house in New Mexico, with three dogs, a barbecue, and an SUV in the driveway. But not every suburban household boasts its own particle accelerator. A stroll through the backyard reveals what looks like a giant Van de Graaff generator with a pipe spiraling out of it, marked with CAUTION: RADIATION signs. A sticker on the SUV reads POWERED BY HYDROGEN, while another sign by the front gate warns, TRESPASSERS WILL BE USED FOR SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS.

Science experiments are United Nuclear’s business. The chemicals available on the company’s Web site range from ammonium dichromate (the main ingredient in the classic science-fair volcano) to zinc oxide powder (which absorbs UV light). Lazar and White also sell elements like sodium and mercury, radioactive minerals, and geeky curiosities like aerogel, an ultralightweight foam developed by NASA to capture comet dust. The Department of Homeland Security buys the company’s powerful infrared flashlights by the case; the Mythbusters guys on the Discovery Channel recently picked up 10 superstrong neodymium magnets. (These come with the sobering caveat: “Beware – you must think ahead when moving these magnets … Loose metallic objects and other magnets may become airborne and fly considerable distances.”) Fire departments in Nevada and California send for United Nuclear’s Geiger counters and uranium ore to train hazmat crews.

A former employee of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the 47-year-old Lazar radiates a boyish enthusiasm for science and gadgets. White, 50, is a trim licensed aesthetician who does herbal facials for local housewives while helping her husband run the company. When the officers determined that Lazar and White posed no physical threat, they freed the couple from their handcuffs and produced a search warrant. United Nuclear’s computers and business records were carted off in a van.

The search was initiated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a federal agency best known for instigating recalls of faulty cribs and fire-prone space heaters. The CPSC’s concern with United Nuclear was not the uranium, the magnets, or the backyard accelerator. It was the chemicals – specifically sulfur, potassium perchlorate, and powdered aluminum, all of which can be used to make illegal fireworks. The agency suspected that Lazar and White were selling what amounted to kits for making M-80s, cherry bombs, and other prohibited items; such kits are banned by the CPSC under the Federal Hazardous Substances Act.

“We are not just a recall agency,” explains CPSC spokesperson Scott Wolfson. “We have turned our attention to the chemical components used in the manu-facture of illegal fireworks, which can cause amputations and death.” A 2004 study by the agency found that 2 percent of fireworks-related injuries that year were caused by homemade or altered fireworks; the majority involved the mishandling of commercial firecrackers, bottle rockets, and sparklers. Nonetheless, Wolfson says, “we’ve fostered a very close relationship with the Justice Department and we’re out there on the Internet looking to see who is promoting these core chemicals. Fireworks is one area where we’re putting people in prison.”

In the past several years, the CPSC has gone after a variety of online vendors, demanding the companies require customers to prove they have a license to manufacture explosives before they can purchase any chemical associated with making them. Many of these compounds, however, are also highly useful for conducting science experiments. Sulfur, for example, is an ingredient in hydrogen sulfide, an important tool for chemical analysis. Potassium perchlorate and potassium nitrate are widely used in labs as oxidizers.

The CPSC’s war on illegal fireworks is one of several forces producing a chilling effect on amateur research in chemistry. National security issues and laws aimed at thwarting the production of crystal meth are threatening to put an end to home laboratories. In schools, rising liability concerns are making teachers wary of allowing students to perform their own experiments. Some educators even speculate that a lack of chem lab experience is contributing to the declining interest in science careers among young people.

United Nuclear got its computers back a few days after they were hauled away, and three years passed before Lazar and White heard from the authorities again. This spring, the couple was charged with violating the Federal Hazardous Substances Act and shipping restricted chemicals across state lines. If convicted, Lazar and White each face a maximum penalty of 270 days in prison and a $15,000 fine.

The lure of do-it-yourself chemistry has always been the most potent recruiting tool science has to offer. Many kids attracted by the promise of filling the garage with clouds of ammonium sulfide – the proverbial stink bomb – went on to brilliant careers in mathematics, biology, programming, and medicine.

Intel cofounder Gordon Moore set off his first boom in Silicon Valley two decades before pioneering the design of the integrated circuit. One afternoon in 1940, near the spot where Interstate 280 intersects Sand Hill Road today, the future father of the semiconductor industry knelt beside a cache of homemade dynamite and lit the fuse. He was 11 years old.

Moore’s pyrotechnic adventures grew out of his experiments with a neighbor’s chemistry set. He turned a shed beside the family house into a lab, stocking it with chemicals mail-ordered from San Francisco and filling an old dresser with beakers and funnels. Now retired, the 77-year-old Moore looks back on his days and nights in the shed as a time when he learned to think and work like a scientist. “The things I made, like nitroglycerin, took a fair amount of lab technique,” he recalls. “I specialized in explosives because they were fun, and I liked doing things that got results in a hurry.”

Many of Moore’s illustrious peers also first got interested in science by performing experiments at home. After reading a book called The Boy Scientist at age 10, Vint Cerf – who became one of the architects of the Internet – spent months blowing up thermite volcanoes and launching backyard rockets. Growing up in Colorado, David Packard – the late cofounder of Hewlett-Packard – concocted new recipes for gunpowder. The neurologist Oliver Sacks writes about his adolescent love affair with “stinks and bangs” in Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. “There’s no question that stinks and bangs and crystals and colors are what drew kids – particularly boys – to science,” says Roald Hoffmann of Cornell University, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1981. “Now the potential for stinks and bangs has been legislated out.”

Popular Science columnist Theodore Gray, who is one of United Nuclear’s regular customers, uses potassium perchlorate to demonstrate the abundance of energy stored in sugar and fat. He chops up Snickers bars, sprinkles in the snowy crystals, and ignites the mixture, which bursts into a tower of flame – the same rapid exothermic reaction that propels model rockets skyward. “Why is it that I can walk into Wal-Mart and buy boxes of bullets and black powder, but I can’t buy potassium perchlorate to do science because it can also be used to make explosives?” he asks. “How many people are injured each year doing extreme sports or playing high school football? But mention mixing up chemicals in your home lab, and people have a much lower index of acceptable risk.”
The push to restrict access to chemicals by those who have no academic or scientific credentials gained momentum in the mid-’90s following the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. In the years since 9/11, the Defense Department, FBI, and other government agencies have strategized ways of tracking even small purchases of potentially dangerous chemicals. “The fact that there are amateurs and retired professors out there who need access to these chemicals is a valid problem,” acknowledges Rice University chemistry professor James Tour, who consulted with the Pentagon and the Justice Department, “but there aren’t many of those guys weighed against the possible dangers.”

A provision in the 2002 Homeland Security Act mandated background checks and licensing requirements for model-rocket enthusiasts on the grounds that ammonium perchlorate fuel is an explosive; the Justice Department argued that terrorists could deploy model rockets to shoot down commercial airliners. A bill pending in both houses of Congress would empower the Department of Homeland Security to regulate sales of ammonium nitrate, a common fertilizer that Timothy McVeigh used to make the Oklahoma City bomb. “We finally have bipartisan support and encouragement from the chemical industry on this, which is important, because we’ve seen what can happen when these materials fall into the wrong hands,” says US representative Curt Weldon (R-Pennsylvania), who is sponsoring the House bill. “As we move forward, we’re going to be taking a very close look at other chemicals that should be regulated.”

In the meantime, more than 30 states have passed laws to restrict sales of chemicals and lab equipment associated with meth production, which has resulted in a decline in domestic meth labs, but makes things daunting for an amateur chemist shopping for supplies. It is illegal in Texas, for example, to buy such basic labware as Erlenmeyer flasks or three-necked beakers without first registering with the state’s Department of Public Safety to declare that they will not be used to make drugs. Among the chemicals the Portland, Oregon, police department lists online as “commonly associated with meth labs” are such scientifically useful compounds as liquid iodine, isopropyl alcohol, sulfuric acid, and hydrogen peroxide, along with chemistry glassware and pH strips. Similar lists appear on hundreds of Web sites.

“To criminalize the necessary materials of discovery is one of the worst things you can do in a free society,” says Shawn Carlson, a 1999 MacArthur fellow and founder of the Society for Amateur Scientists. “The Mr. Coffee machine that every Texas legislator has near his desk has three violations of the law built into it: a filter funnel, a Pyrex beaker, and a heating element. The laws against meth should be the deterrent to making it – not criminalizing activities that train young people to appreciate science.”

The increasingly strict regulatory climate has driven a wedge of paranoia between young chemists and their potential mentors. “I don’t tell anyone about what I do at home,” writes one anonymous high schooler on Sciencemadness.org, an online forum for amateur scientists. “A lot of ignorant people at my school will just spread rumors about me … The teacher will hear about them and I will get into legal trouble … I have so much glassware at my house, any excuse will not cut it. So I keep my mouth shut.”

Ironically, a shadow of suspicion is being cast over home chemistry at a time when the contributions of amateurs to the progress of science are highly regarded. In recent years, citizen scientists have discovered comets and supernovas and invented tools for gauging Earth’s magnetic field. Peer-reviewed journals like Nature now welcome papers coauthored by auto-didacts like Forrest Mims III, who studies solar storms and atmospheric conditions at his home observatory in Texas. Personal computers, digital cameras, and other consumer electronic devices are putting more accurate means of recording and measuring phenomena into the hands of home tinkerers than were available in high-end labs just a few years ago. The Internet is the ultimate enabling technology, allowing amateurs to collaborate with their counterparts at NASA and other organizations.

Porting the hacker ethic to the nonvirtual world, magazines like Make and blogs like Boing Boing are making it cool for geeks to get their hands dirty again, offering how-tos on everything from building your own telescope to assembling an electronic insect army. DIY robotics-fests like Dorkbot (“people doing strange things with electricity,” according to the Web site) are taking off from Boston to Bangalore.

But the hands-on revival is leaving home chemists behind. While surplus lab equipment is available on eBay, chemicals are subject to the site’s filtering software, which tracks or blocks the sale of items tagged as hazardous by the US Postal Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency. “There are very few commercial supply houses willing to sell chemicals to amateurs anymore because of this fear that we’re all criminals and terrorists,” Carlson says. “Ordinary folks no longer have access to the things they need to make real discoveries in chemistry.”

The heyday of home experimentation in the US coincided with the rise of the Porter Chemical Company, makers of the legendary Chemcraft labs-in-a-box, which contained enough bottles and beakers to perform more than 800 experiments. At the height of its popularity in the 1950s, Porter awarded college scholarships, mined its own chemicals, and was the biggest user of test tubes in the US. The company produced more than a million chemistry sets before going out of business in the 1980s amid increasing liability concerns.

One kid whose interest in science was sparked by the gift of a chemistry set was Don Herbert, who grew up to host a popular TV show in the 1950s called Watch Mr. Wizard. With his eye-popping demonstrations and low-key midwestern manner, Mr. Wizard gave generations of future scientists and teachers the confidence to perform experiments at home. In 1999, Restoration Hardware founder Stephen Gordon teamed up with Renee Whitney, general manager of a toy company called Wild Goose, to try to re-create the chemistry set Herbert marketed almost 50 years ago. “Don was so sweet,” Whitney recalls. “He invited us to his home to have dinner with him and his wife. Then he pulled his old chemistry set out of the garage. It was amazing – a real metal cabinet, like a little closet, filled with dozens of light-resistant bottles.”

Gordon and Whitney soon learned that few of the items in Mr. Wizard’s cabinet could be included in the product. “Unfortunately, we found that more than half the chemicals were illegal to sell to children because they’re considered dangerous,” Whitney explains. By the time the Mr. Wizard Science Set appeared in stores, it came with balloons, clay, Super Balls, and just five chemicals, including laundry starch, which was tagged with an ominous warning: HANDLE CAREFULLY. NOT EXPECTED TO BE A HEALTH HAZARD.

“It wasn’t really something you could use to teach kids about chemistry,” acknowledges Thomas Nikosey, head of Mr. Wizard Studios, which handles licensing for the 88-year-old Herbert.

Kits that train kids how to do real chemistry have yielded to innocuous science-flavored toys. At the Web site Discover This, one typical product promises lessons in making “rock candy, superbubbles, and molding clay … without blowing up the house.”

One of the few companies still selling chemistry sets worthy of the name is a German-American venture called Thames & Kosmos, run by former Adobe software engineer Ted McGuire. The company’s top-of-the-line kit, the C3000, is equipped with a full complement of test tubes, beakers, pipettes, litmus paper, and more than two dozen useful compounds. But even the C3000, which retails for $200, comes with a shopping list of chemicals that must be purchased elsewhere to perform certain experiments. “A lot of retailers are scared to carry a real chemistry set now because of liability concerns,” McGuire explains. “The stuff under your kitchen sink is far more dangerous than the things in our kits, but put the word chemistry on something and people become terrified.”
The chemophobia that’s put a damper on home science has also invaded America’s classrooms, where hands-on labs are being replaced by liability-proof teacher demonstrations with the explicit message Don’t try this at home. A guide for teachers of grades 7 through 12 issued by the American Chemical Society in 2001 makes the prospect of an hour in the lab seem fraught with peril: “Every chemical, without exception, is hazardous. Did you know that oxygen is poisonous if inhaled at a concentration a bit greater than its natural concentration in the air?” More than half of the suggested experiments in a multimedia package for schools called “You Be the Chemist,” created in 2004 by the Chemical Educational Foundation, are to be performed by the teacher alone, leaving students to blow up balloons (with safety goggles in place) or answer questions like “How many pretzels can you eat in a minute?”

“A lot of schools don’t have chemistry labs anymore,” explains CEF educational coordinator Laurel Brent. “We want to give kids lessons that tie in to their real-world experiences without having them deal with a lot of strange chemicals in bottles that have big long names.”

Many students are ill at ease when faced with actual compounds and lab equipment for the first time at school. A study of “chemistry anxiety” in the Journal of Chemical Education concluded in 2000 that “the presence of this anxiety in our students could be a contributing factor in the overall poor performance of high school students in science.” (Commonly reported fears included “lighting the Bunsen burner,” “fire,” and “getting chemicals on skin.”) Restrictions on hands-on chemical experience is “a problem that has been building for 10 or 15 years, driven by liability and safety concerns,” says John Moore, editor in chief of the JCE.

“The liability issues are a cop-out,” says Bassam Shakhashiri, the author of a four-volume guide to classroom chemistry who has taught for 36 years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Kids are being robbed of the joy of discovering things for themselves.” Compared with students in previous generations, he says, undergraduates raised on hands-off science seem passive: “They want someone to do things for them. Even those who become chem majors and grad students are not as versatile in the lab, because their experiences in middle school and high school were so limited. This is a terrible shame. By working with real substances, you learn how to ask the right questions about the physical world, which is half the battle in science.”

Paradoxically, at a time when young people are particularly excited about technology, their enthusiasm for learning about the science behind it is waning. Thirty years ago, the US ranked third in the world in the number of science and engineering degrees awarded in the 18-to-24 age group. Now the country ranks 17th, according to the National Science Board. A 2004 report called Trends in International Mathematics and Science Education Study found that while fourth graders in the US rank sixth in basic science scores when measured against their peers worldwide, by the time they’re in eighth grade, they’ve slipped to ninth place. Prompted by concern that America is falling behind, President Bush proposed a $380 million “competitiveness initiative” this year that promises to train 70,000 new teachers of Advanced Placement science and math. By the time students have the opportunity to enroll in an AP course, however, many have already absorbed the message that science is best left to trained professionals.

“You have to capture kids’ imaginations very young or you lose them forever,” says Steve Spangler, a former protégé of Mr. Wizard who is now a science correspondent for the NBC affiliate in Denver. “But that’s hard when you have teachers required to check out vinegar and baking soda from the front office because something bad might happen in class. Slowly but surely the teaching tools are being taken away, so schools end up saying, ‘Let’s get a college professor to do this demonstration, and kids can watch the streaming video.’”

To Bill Nye, the “Science Guy” who hosted an Emmy award-winning series on PBS in the 1990s, unreasonable fears about chemicals and home experimentation reflect a distrust of scientific expertise taking hold in society at large. “People who want to make meth will find ways to do it that don’t require an Erlenmeyer flask. But raising a generation of people who are technically incompetent is a recipe for disaster.”

To ensure that the tradition of home chemistry survives, self-proclaimed “mad scientists” are creating a research underground on Web sites like Sciencemadness, Readily Available Chemicals, and the International Order of Nitrogen. There, in comfortable anonymity, seasoned experimenters, novices, and connoisseurs of banned molecules share tips on finding alternative sources for chemicals and labware.

One key to working as a DIY chemist, says Matthew Ernst, the 25-year-old host of Sciencemadness, is realizing how many useful chemicals are still available as household products or items designed for specialized niches. Silver nitrate, for example, can be found at potters’ supply stores, where it lends raku glazes an uncanny luster. “Amateur chemists become compulsive label readers,” Ernst says. “Many compounds are available if the chemist is willing to split his shopping between the paint store, hardware store, ceramics supplier, gardening center, welding supplier, feed store, and metal recycler.”

Out-of-print texts like Julius B. Cohen’s 1910 Practical Organic Chemistry are being made available again in PDF form on file-sharing networks and the Internet Archive. To route around stigmatized chemical pathways, home experimenters are reviving 19th-century methods of synthesizing reagents from scratch. Shawn Carlson of the Society for Amateur Scientists calls this “embracing Grandpa’s chemistry.”

Carlson’s group acts as a virtual co-op for its nearly 2,000 members by facilitating small purchases of legal chemicals and equipment. The group is also launching an ambitious national program called Labrats to provide mentoring to the next generation of researchers by teaming students with working scientists.

The father of three young children, Carlson understands parental concerns about safety. But he believes that the exhilaration of risk has always been a powerful factor in engaging kids’ interest in science, and should be actively encouraged – while minimizing the physical hazards. “We can get rid of most of the actual dangers, but it’s important that we preserve the perception of danger in science,” he says. “When I do experiments with my own kids, I’m more than happy to let them believe that if they’re not careful, something could happen to them. It adds that extra element of ‘my fate is in my hands – but if I do this right, everything will be fine.’”

In March, Bob Lazar and Joy White were building a new two-story home for United Nuclear in a clearing behind their house, hiring three assistants, and weathering a nerve-wracking shortage of aerogel after Boing Boing posted a link. Then news of the Justice Department’s charges against them arrived, and they called their lawyer to begin planning their defense.

“Kids read about the great scientists and their discoveries throughout history, and marvel that people once did these things,” Lazar says. “But they marvel a little too much. Taking chemicals and lab equipment away from kids who love science is like taking crayons and paints away from a kid who may grow up to be an artist.”
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...try&topic_set=





FBI Finds It Frequently Overstepped in Collecting Data
John Solomon

An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.

The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau's national security investigations since 2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI's domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials said in interviews. The earlier report found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling.

The vast majority of the new violations were instances in which telephone companies and Internet providers gave agents phone and e-mail records the agents did not request and were not authorized to collect. The agents retained the information anyway in their files, which mostly concerned suspected terrorist or espionage activities.

But two dozen of the newly-discovered violations involved agents' requests for information that U.S. law did not allow them to have, according to the audit results provided to The Washington Post. Only two such examples were identified earlier in the smaller sample.

FBI officials said the results confirmed what agency supervisors and outside critics feared, namely that many agents did not understand or follow the required legal procedures and paperwork requirements when collecting personal information with one of the most sensitive and powerful intelligence-gathering tools of the post-Sept. 11 era -- the National Security Letter, or NSL.

Such letters are uniformly secret and amount to nonnegotiable demands for personal information -- demands that are not reviewed in advance by a judge. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, Congress substantially eased the rules for issuing NSLs, requiring only that the bureau certify that the records are "sought for" or "relevant to" an investigation "to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."

The change -- combined with national anxiety about another domestic terrorist event -- led to an explosive growth in the use of the letters. More than 19,000 such letters were issued in 2005 seeking 47,000 pieces of information, mostly from telecommunications companies. But with this growth came abuse of the newly relaxed rules, a circumstance first revealed in the Justice Department's March report by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine.

"The FBI's comprehensive audit of National Security Letter use across all field offices has confirmed the inspector general's findings that we had inadequate internal controls for use of an invaluable investigative tool," FBI General Counsel Valerie E. Caproni said. "Our internal audit examined a much larger sample than the inspector general's report last March, but we found similar percentages of NSLs that had errors."

"Since March," Caproni added, "remedies addressing every aspect of the problem have been implemented or are well on the way."

Of the more than 1,000 violations uncovered by the new audit, about 700 involved telephone companies and other communications firms providing information that exceeded what the FBI's national security letters had sought. But rather than destroying the unsolicited data, agents in some instances issued new National Security Letters to ensure that they could keep the mistakenly provided information. Officials cited as an example the retention of an extra month's phone records, beyond the period specified by the agents.

Case agents are now told that they must identify mistakenly produced information and isolate it from investigative files. "Human errors will inevitably occur with third parties, but we now have a clear plan with clear lines of responsibility to ensure errant information that is mistakenly produced will be caught as it is produced and before it is added to any FBI database," Caproni said.

The FBI also found that in 14 investigations, counterintelligence agents using NSLs improperly gathered full credit reports from financial institutions, exercising authority provided by the USA Patriot Act but meant to be applied only in counterterrorism cases. In response, the bureau has distributed explicit instructions that "you can't gather full credit reports in counterintelligence cases," a senior FBI official said.

In 10 additional investigations, FBI agents used NSLs to request other information that the relevant laws did not allow them to obtain. Officials said that, for example, agents might have requested header information from e-mails -- such as the subject lines -- even though NSLs are supposed to be used to gather information only about the e-mails' senders and the recipients, not about their content.

The FBI audit also identified three dozen violations of rules requiring that NSLs be approved by senior officials and used only in authorized cases. In 10 instances, agents issued National Security Letters to collect personal data without tying the requests to specific, active investigations -- as the law requires -- either because, in each case, an investigative file had not been opened yet or the authorization for an investigation had expired without being renewed.

FBI officials said the audit found no evidence to date that any agent knowingly or willingly violated the laws or that supervisors encouraged such violations. The Justice Department's report estimated that agents made errors about 4 percent of the time and that third parties made mistakes about 3 percent of the time, they said. The FBI's audit, they noted, found a slightly higher error rate for agents -- about 5 percent -- and a substantially higher rate of third-party errors -- about 10 percent.

The officials said they are making widespread changes to ensure that the problems do not recur. Those changes include implementing a corporate-style, continuous, internal compliance program to review the bureau's policies, procedures and training, to provide regular monitoring of employees' work by supervisors in each office, and to conduct frequent audits to track compliance across the bureau.

The bureau is also trying to establish for NSLs clear lines of responsibility, which were lacking in the past, officials said. Agents who open counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations have been told that they are solely responsible for ensuring that they do not receive data they are not entitled to have.

The FBI audit did not turn up new instances in which another surveillance tool known as an Exigent Circumstance Letter had been abused, officials said. In a finding that prompted particularly strong concerns on Capitol Hill, the Justice Department had said such letters -- which are similar to NSLs but are meant to be used only in security emergencies -- had been invoked hundreds of times in "non-emergency circumstances" to obtain detailed phone records, mostly without the required links to active investigations.

Many of those letters were improperly dispatched by the bureau's Communications Analysis Unit, a central clearinghouse for the analysis of telephone records such as those gathered with the help of "exigent" letters and National Security Letters. Justice Department and FBI investigators are trying to determine if any FBI headquarters officials should be held accountable or punished for those abuses, and have begun advising agents of their due process rights during interviews.

The FBI audit will be completed in the coming weeks, and Congress will be briefed on the results, officials said. FBI officials said each potential violation will then be extensively reviewed by lawyers to determine if it must be reported to the Intelligence Oversight Board, a presidential panel of senior intelligence officials created to safeguard civil liberties.

The officials said the final tally of violations that are serious enough to be reported to the panel might be much less than the number turned up by the audit, noting that only five of the 22 potential violations identified by the Justice Department's inspector general this spring were ultimately deemed to be reportable.

"We expect that percentage will hold or be similar when we get through the hundreds of potential violations identified here," said a senior FBI official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the bureau's findings have not yet been made public.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...302453_pf.html





Judge Orders FBI to Release Abuse Records
By bean

A judge has ordered the FBI to release agency records about its abuse of National Security Letters (NSLs) to collect Americans’ personal information. The ruling came just a day after the EFF urged the judge to immediately respond in its lawsuit over agency delays. This is the same case in which an internal FBI audit found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years.

The EFF sued the FBI in April for failing to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about the misuse of NSLs as revealed in a Justice Department report, and EFF urged the judge Thursday to force the FBI to stop stalling the release of its records on the deeply flawed program.

More evidence of abuse has been uncovered by the Washington Post (see above). They write:

“An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism. The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau’s national security investigations since 2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI’s domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials said in interviews.

The earlier report found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling. The vast majority of the new violations were instances in which telephone companies and Internet providers gave agents phone and e-mail records the agents did not request and were not authorized to collect. The agents retained the information anyway in their files, which mostly concerned suspected terrorist or espionage activities.”

According to the judge’s order, the FBI is required to process 2500 pages of NSL-related records by July 5, and then 2500 pages every 30 days thereafter. See the EFF website for more information.
http://www.lawbean.com/2007/06/15/ju...abuse-records/





New FBI Guidelines Aim to Curb Abuse
Lara Jakes Jordan

The FBI warned its agents Wednesday to carefully review all personal data collected from Americans in terror investigations to protect their privacy rights and not to expect the evidence to remain secret.

The warning came in new FBI guidelines issued to correct abuses of so-called national security letters that were revealed in a Justice Department audit three months ago. The letters allow investigators to subpoena evidence, without court approval, in terrorism and spy cases.

Under the 24-page guidelines, which are effective immediately, investigators must request specific information -- and justify its need -- before the demand for data is sent.

Moreover, the strictly worded rules require all evidence received from the subpoena to be reviewed before it is uploaded into FBI databases to make sure that only the information specifically requested is used. Any irrelevant or extra material received will be locked away from investigators and, potentially, ultimately returned or destroyed.

''Receiving information beyond the scope of an NSL is a potential ... violation, regardless of whether the overproduction occurred as a result of an error by the FBI or the NSL recipient,'' the guidelines state.

Agents must lay out reasons the request must remain secret, as outlined in the USA Patriot Act, which governs the use of national security letters, when it was reauthorized in 2005.

''Non-disclosure is not required in all NSLs,'' the guidelines state. They note, however, that ''the statutory standard for non-disclosure will be met in most cases'' -- including when there is concern that revealing an investigation would tip off its targeted suspect.

A copy of the guidelines was obtained from the American Civil Liberties Union, which received them Wednesday evening in a fax from the FBI. Neither the FBI nor the ACLU had an immediate comment.

Under the Patriot Act, the national security letters give the FBI authority to demand that telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit bureaus and other businesses produce personal records about their customers or subscribers.

The March audit, by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine, found that FBI agents sometimes demanded personal data on U.S. citizens or legal residents without official authorization and in other cases improperly obtained telephone records in non-emergencies. The audit, which looked at NSLs issued between 2003 and 2005, also concluded that the FBI underreported to Congress how often it used national security letters to ask businesses to turn over customer data.

The guidelines are a first step toward fixing the abuses and protecting privacy rights, as promised in March by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller. They also:

--Eliminate use of so-called exigent letters to demand information from companies in emergencies without being authorized by an NSL. Agents may still ask for the information in cases of ''death or danger or serious physical injury,'' but companies cannot be forced to comply.

--Require that cover letters for NSLs not merely contain ''bare bones'' information to justify the need for the data. Typos and other erroneous information in the cover letter or NSL that, for example, could lead to unneeded data being released will be investigated and potentially penalized. Additionally, agents cannot request information on activities that are covered by the First Amendment, such as attending a mosque. While the cover letters are usually classified, the NSLs themselves and the data received in return are not necessarily.

--Require FBI attorneys to carefully review all NSL requests.

--Require special agents in charge of the FBI's 56 field offices to inform any employees working on national security letter cases of the guidelines and to participate in future training classes to make sure they are used properly.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/...s/4888329.html





States Rebel Against Real ID Act
Bean

Four states have passed laws that reject federal rules regarding a national identification system. This casts serious doubt on the future of the 2005 Real ID Act that goes into effect in December 2009. New Hampshire and Oklahoma joined Montana and Washington state in the passage of statutes that refute guidelines set forth in the Act. However, these actions could eventually lead to drivers licenses issued in these states to not be accepted as official identification when boarding airplanes or accessing federal buildings. In addition to these four states, members of the Idaho legislature intentionally left out money in the budget to comply with the Act.

The Real ID Act raises serious privacy concerns, but there is disagreement about whether the Act will actually institute a national identification card system or not. The new law only sets forth national standards, but leaves the issuance of cards and the maintenance of databases in state hands. Some claim that this does not constitute a true national ID system, and may even forestall the arrival of national ID. Yet others argue that this is a trivial distinction, and that the new cards are in fact national ID cards, thanks to the uniform national standards created by the AAMVA and the linking of state databases.

The actions by these states are increasingly putting pressure on Congress and the Department of Homeland Security to change or repeal the law. The Wisconsin State Journal has an incredibly good analysis of the mess. They write:

States have rebelled at the $14 billion in costs the act imposes on states, as well as worries that the new security system will invade residents’ privacy and create what amounts to a national ID card.

On Capitol Hill, two bills would repeal the law, one co-sponsored by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. However, an amendment to the immigration bill now being debated in the U.S. Senate would ratchet up the consequences for states that fail to comply with Real ID. The Senate’s proposed immigration law would require job applicants to verify their citizenship to employers using a driver’s license that meets Real ID standards or with a passport.
http://www.lawbean.com/2007/06/11/st...t-real-id-act/





Disaffected Conservatives Set a Litmus Test for '08

Want vow to curb presidential power
Charlie Savage

A new political group recently asked Mitt Romney to promise not to wiretap Americans without a judge's approval or to imprison US citizens without a trial as "enemy combatants." When Romney declined to sign their pledge, the group denounced him as "unfit to serve as president."

Such rhetoric might be expected from liberal activists. But these critics, who call their organization American Freedom Agenda, are hardly leftists. They represent what they insist is a growing group of disaffected conservatives who are demanding that the Republican Party return to its traditional mistrust of concentrated government power.

"Mitt Romney's ignorance of the Constitution's checks and balances and protections against government abuses would have alarmed the Founding Fathers and their conservative philosophy," said Bruce Fein, one of the group's co founders and a Reagan administration attorney, in a press release last month attacking Romney for not signing the pledge.

The American Freedom Agenda, which intends to put all candidates in both parties to the same test, is aiming to revive a strand of conservatism that they say has been drowned out since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The conservative principle of limited government, they say, means not just cutting the budget, but imposing checks and balances on those who wield power.

"Conservatives have to go back to the basics," said co founder Richard Viguerie , a veteran direct-mail strategist and author of "Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause." "We have to go back and re launch the conservative movement. And for traditional conservatives, it's part of our nature to believe in the separation of powers."

The other two co founders are Bob Barr, a former Republican congressman from Georgia, and David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union .

All four argue that Bush is not a true conservative, and they decided to join forces earlier this year to make the expansion of executive power a topic of debate in the 2008 presidential election. They have applied for tax-exempt status, created a website, and drawn up a 10-point pledge that they intend to ask every candidate to sign.

"I hereby pledge that if elected President of the United States I will undertake the following to restore the Constitution's checks and balances : to honor fundamental protections against injustice, and to eschew usurpations of legislative or judicial power," the pledge reads. "These are keystones of national security and individual freedom."

Other points in the pledge include renouncing the use of presidential signing statements to claim a right to disobey laws; ending threats to prosecute journalists who write about classified matters; and promising to use regular courts rather than military commissions to try terrorism suspects. The full pledge is posted on the group's website, AmericanFreedomAgenda.org.

The group also plans to lobby Congress to pass legislation imposing stronger checks and balances on the presidency. It is urging debate moderators to ask questions of the candidates about their views on the limits of presidential power, and it is planning to host events to raise voter awareness of the issue.

While the group's ambitions are large, it has yet to make a sizable impression on the race.

One presidential candidate -- Representative Ron Paul of Texas, the libertarian-minded Republican who trails far behind GOP front - runners Rudy Giuliani , John McCain , and Romney -- has signed the pledge. Paul called up the American Freedom Agenda and signed its pledge after it announced its existence in March, Fein said.

There are other ties with the Paul campaign. Fein has volunteered to help Paul if any legal fight arises over getting onto a state's primary ballot, and campaign consultant Mark Fitzgibbons, who is Paul's communications director, is also a volunteer adviser to the American Freedom Agenda. But Fein said there is no conflict of interest in the group vetting Paul's rivals.

"I understand you can get an optics problem here, but we have not said we are going to reserve applause to just one candidate," Fein said. "We told Romney that 'we'll single you out and hold a press conference to celebrate you if you sign it,' so I don't think we can be accused of slanting the playing field toward any particular candidate."

They approached Romney first, he added, because they thought he was likely to want such an endorsement by a conservative group. But through Gary Marx , Romney's liaison to conservatives, Romney said he was not going to sign their pledge for now -- prompting the scathing "Conservatives Say Mitt Romney Unfit to Serve as President" press release.

The press release caused some consternation at the Romney headquarters. A spokesman, Kevin Madden , said that Romney did not say he would never sign the pledge, as the press release implied, only that "at this point we're going to take a pass." He declined to comment further.

Some conservatives who have supported Bush's broad claims of executive power are skeptical that the group will get many candidates to sign -- or succeed in making the growth of White House power a topic of debate.

David Rivkin , an associate counsel in the Bush-Quayle administration, argued that neither Republicans nor Democrats mind the aggressive exercise of presidential power if their party controls the White House.

"The notion -- that assertive presidential leadership with a strong view of presidential power is inherently bad -- I think that just won't resonate with the American people," Rivkin said. "Democrats don't like various policies of Bush's, but they would feel quite comfortable if Hillary Clinton were doing it. Republicans are comfortable with Bush doing it, but not so much if Clinton were doing it."

And Charlie Arlinghouse , the president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, a free-market think-tank in Concord, N.H., said that taxes, terrorism, and Iraq dominate GOP voters' thinking. He said it will require a lot of work for the American Freedom Agenda to raise awareness about the abstract issue of executive power among average New Hampshire voters.

"The notion of executive power is not anything that anyone thinks about while they're mowing their lawn," Arlinghouse said. "So there may be fertile ground here, but someone is going to have to start plowing."

But Fein argued the country would be more secure if the presidency adhered to checks on its power. Such Bush administration policies as authorizing harsh interrogation techniques despite laws and treaties forbidding torture, he said, "are making us more vulnerable" by inflaming anti-American sentiment and "creating new generations of jihadists."

And the group's founders argued that the 2008 election presents a good opportunity for a bipartisan debate about what they see as unchecked executive power. Democrats will view the issue through the prism of the Bush administration, while Republicans will be forced to think about a Democratic presidency, they said.

"As it becomes more and more clear that Hillary Clinton could be the president of the United States, this is going to get a lot of conservatives' attention in a way it hasn't done before in recent years," Viguerie said.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/ar..._08/?page=full





Video Recording Leads to Felony Charge
Matt Miller

Brian D. Kelly didn't think he was doing anything illegal when he used his videocamera to record a Carlisle police officer during a traffic stop. Making movies is one of his hobbies, he said, and the stop was just another interesting event to film.

Now he's worried about going to prison or being burdened with a criminal record.

Kelly, 18, of Carlisle, was arrested on a felony wiretapping charge, with a penalty of up to 7 years in state prison.

His camera and film were seized by police during the May 24 stop, he said, and he spent 26 hours in Cumberland County Prison until his mother posted her house as security for his $2,500 bail.

Kelly is charged under a state law that bars the intentional interception or recording of anyone's oral conversation without their consent.

The criminal case relates to the sound, not the pictures, that his camera picked up.

"I didn't think I could get in trouble for that," Kelly said. "I screwed up, yeah. I know now that I can't do that. I just don't see how something like this should affect my entire life."

Whether that will happen could be determined during Kelly's preliminary hearing before District Judge Jessica Brewbaker in July.

No one seems intent on punishing him harshly.

"Obviously, ignorance of the law is no defense," District Attorney David Freed said. "But often these cases come down to questions of intent."

According to police, Kelly was riding in a pickup truck that had been stopped for alleged traffic violations.

Police said the officer saw Kelly had a camera in his lap, aimed at him and was concealing it with his hands. They said Kelly was arrested after he obeyed an order to turn the camera off and hand it over.

The wiretap charge was filed after consultation with a deputy district attorney, police said.

Kelly said his friend was cited for speeding and because his truck's bumper was too low. He said he held the camera in plain view and turned it on when the officer yelled at his pal.

After about 20 minutes, the officer cited the driver on the traffic charges and told the men they were being recorded by a camera in his cruiser, Kelly said.

"He said, 'Young man, turn off your ... camera,'¤" Kelly said. "I turned it off and handed it to him. ... Six or seven more cops pulled up, and they arrested me."

Police also took film from his pockets that wasn't related to the traffic stop, he said.

Freed said his office has handled other wiretapping cases, some involving ex-lovers or divorcing couples who are trying to record former partners doing something improper for leverage in court battles, he said.

Such charges have been dismissed or defendants have been allowed to plead to lesser counts or enter a program to avoid criminal records, he said.

The outcome hinges on whether the person had a malicious intent, Freed said.

Carlisle Police Chief Stephen Margeson said allowing Kelly to plead to a lesser charge might be proper.

"I don't think that would cause anyone any heartburn," he said. "I don't believe there was any underlying criminal intent here."

But Margeson said he doesn't regard the filing of the felony charge as unwarranted and said the officer followed procedures.

John Mancke, a Harrisburg defense attorney familiar with the wiretapping law, said the facts, as related by police, indicate Kelly might have violated the law.

"If he had the sound on, he has a problem," Mancke said.

Last year, Mancke defended a North Middleton Twp. man in a street racing case that involved a wiretapping charge. Police claimed the man ordered associates to tape police breaking up an illegal race after officers told him to turn off their cameras.

That wiretapping count was dismissed when the man pleaded guilty to charges of illegal racing, defiant trespass and obstruction of justice. He was sentenced to probation.

An exception to the wiretapping law allows police to film people during traffic stops, Mancke said.

Margeson said his department's cruisers are equipped with cameras, and officers are told to inform people during incidents that they are being recorded.

First Assistant District Attorney Jaime Keating said case law is in flux as to whether police can expect not to be recorded while performing their duties.

"The law isn't solid," Keating said. "But people who do things like this do so at their own peril."

Kelly said he has called the American Civil Liberties Union for help in the case.

His father, Chris, said he's backing his son.

"We're hoping for a just resolution," he said.
http://blog.pennlive.com/patriotnews...dnt_think.html





Google's Street View Could be Unlawful in Europe
OUT-LAW News

EDITORIAL: Like a trigger-happy tourist, Google has shot almost every street in five US cities and added its pics to what might be the world's biggest holiday album. But if Google ever starts shooting the streets of Europe, courts here could fight back.

Google Maps Street View is the latest service from the search giant. Vehicles with multi-lens cameras travelled the streets of San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami and snapped everything in their paths. The images were uploaded to Google Maps and now, when you're looking at a location in Google Maps that has been photographed, you can see the pics. If you live in a featured city and you've been passed by a Google van or a car from its partner, Immersive Media, the cameras probably saw you too.

Privacy fears were first raised by New Yorker Mary Kalin-Casey. She told the Boing Boing blog that, when trying out Street View, she recognised her cat, Monty, through the window of her own home. She said that the experience made her shake (though she'd have more cause for alarm if the camera captured her Georgian silverware).

I haven't seen anything that has made me shake, at least not yet, though I'm still looking and hoping. I love Google Maps and Street View just makes it better. But if it comes to Europe, there could be complaints that have grounds for litigation.

Complaints could be triggered by the images that spread across the internet like wildfire – the celebrity entering rehab or the nude at the window. And complaints could be triggered by the images that have a more personal impact on lives – the malingerer in the park or the husband on his paramour's porch. It does not matter that the pictures were taken in a public place.

If you are caught on camera and complain to Google, Google will remove the pics. But that may not be enough for Europe's courts.

Our data protection regime lets us take holiday snaps, even of strangers, provided we're doing so for private purposes. But if we're taking snaps for commercial use, where individuals are identifiable, there is no such exemption. We need to notify the subjects, and that's hard for Google to do. Even a loudspeaker on top of the camera cars ("Hi, it's Google here, say 'cheese' everybody!") might not suffice.

The law sets extra requirements for so-called sensitive personal data: it demands explicit consent, not just notification. That means when taking pictures of someone leaving a church or sexual health clinic – which could reveal a religious belief or an illness – camera cars might need to pull over and start picking up signatures.

The need for individuals to be identifiable is an important one: Monty the cat looked like a blob to me. Cats can't sue, even in Europe, but humans are just as hard to identify in Street View from what I've seen because the resolution is too low.

It's not just those who are identifiable and caught in the act that can give Google a tough time. We Europeans could ask Google to ensure that no picture of us appears in Google Maps in the first place.

The nature of this rule varies across Europe, but in the UK we have a right to prevent the display of an image that would cause substantial distress. All we have to do is send an email to Google asking that it does not display a picture of us: "Dear Google, I think your camera caught me in Hyde Park this lunch time canoodling with my wife's best friend. Please make sure I can't be seen in Google Maps because this may cause me substantial distress. I've attached a pic of what I look like." If Google refuses or ignores you, you can go to the Information Commissioner and ask him to enforce the right. If there's damage and distress, you can sue.

Street View is rather like CCTV and the Information Commissioner has published a CCTV Code of Practice. The guidance is surely impossible for Google to follow: "Signs should be placed so that the public are aware that they are entering a zone which is covered by surveillance equipment … [These signs] should be clearly visible and legible to members of the public". The guidance adds that "individuals sunbathing in their back gardens may have a greater expectation of privacy than individuals mowing the lawn of their front garden". Perhaps the Information Commissioner will take a pragmatic view and say that footage of someone walking down a street is acceptable, but footage of someone entering rehab is not. Maybe a mashup of Google Search and Google Maps could locate abortion clinics etc. and delete the footage.

Then there are our human rights.

On an evening in August 1995, a 42-year-old called Geoffrey Peck attempted suicide by cutting his wrists with a kitchen knife while on Brentwood High Street in Essex, England. CCTV cameras caught the action, the council's CCTV operator alerted the police and the police intervened. Peck lived. But still images from the CCTV footage were sold by the local council to the media. Peck took his complaint as far as the European Court of Human Rights and won.

The court said that the disclosure of the footage was a "disproportionate and unjustified interference" with Peck's private life, in violation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The court considered it significant that "[Peck's] actions were seen to an extent which far exceeded any exposure to a passer-by or to security observation and to a degree surpassing that which [Peck] could possibly have foreseen." Peck won damages of £7,000.

There's a qualification here: the Human Rights Act generally applies only to public authorities – and Google is not a public authority. But it does not escape completely. Courts are public authorities, and if someone sues Google for breaching the Data Protection Act in similar circumstances, courts will seek to protect a person's human rights in deciding the case. So human rights enter the case by a back door.

You can see Brentwood High Street in Google Maps, but not with Street View. Perhaps you never will.
http://www.out-law.com/page-8116





Regulations on the Sale of Violent Games May be Coming to Europe
Eric Bangeman

Violent video games are a frequent target for politicians in the United States, but there are also similar discussions going on across the Atlantic. Today, European Union justice ministers met to discuss regulating the sale of violent video games to minors. According to the Deutsche Presse-Agentur, German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries told reporters that the justices were not expected to come up with a plan of action during the meeting held in Luxembourg.
EU patent courts may cause more problems than they fix

As is the case in the US, video game ratings in the EU are voluntary. They are administered by Pan European Game Information and use a combination of age-based ratings and content descriptions much like those provided by the ESRB. Games are rated for bad language, discrimination, depictions of gambling and sex, drug use, and violence.

After a German gunman wounded several people at a secondary school before taking his own life last November, EU Commissioner for Justice, Freedom, and Security Franco Frattini called for increased regulation of the video game industry. In response, two German states quickly drafted legislation that would make the production of games that feature "cruel violence on humans or human-looking characters" illegal. A motion for a European Parliament resolution introduced in March calls for EU governments to "put in place all necessary measures to ban the sale of particularly violent and cruel video games."

The differing legal standards of the EU's members makes drafting legislation difficult, according to Zypries, and her expectation is that member states will voluntarily restrict the sale of what she called "killer games."

The onus for enforcing whatever age restrictions may be enacted will likely fall on retailers. The European Commission plans to come up with penalties for retailers selling age-inappropriate games to minors, but it will be up to each country to define what material will be covered—differing country-by-country definitions on what constitutes age-inappropriate material is yet another obstacle any EU-wide directive will have to overcome.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...to-europe.html





AMA Chimes in on Gaming/Violence Connection, Gaming Addiction
John Timmer

Ars has covered a wide range of studies regarding the potential links between gaming and behavioral changes. The complex and confused literature would seem to preclude any practical action on the current state of the data, but the American Medical Association has waded in with a summary of the research and a set of recommendations for action. Despite the potential for disaster, the AMA recommendations are a measured call for further research and parental involvement.

Back at its 2006 meeting, the AMA decided to look into both the addictive potential and behavioral impact of video gaming content. In an oddly-worded resolution passed at that meeting, they noted that existing AMA policy called for games with violent and/or sexual content be made available only to adults, but that such a policy went against the self-interest of the gaming industry. For some reason, this conflict of interest was presented as a justification to call for an examination of the addictive nature of video games:

RESOLVED, That our American Medical Association Council on Science and Public Health work in conjunction with all appropriate specialty societies to prepare a report reviewing and summarizing the research data on the emotional and behavioral effects, including addiction potential, of video games (Directive to Take Action); and be it further
RESOLVED, That our AMA develop recommendations for physicians, parents and legislators based on the findings of this report. (Directive to Take Action)

The committee assigned the report has now released its findings. Despite its confused mandate, the report is an extremely readable summary of the state of knowledge. The committee did a literature search for all the relevant terms in publications from 1985 to 2007. That literature included information on areas of gaming research that are rarely emphasized. Cases of epilepsy and seizures induced by games are rare enough not to be a concern. Gaming technology can be readily adapted for positive uses in training and rehabilitation. Links with disorders such as deficit/hyperactivity haven't been explored in sufficient detail.

When it comes to more typical topics, the summary is cogent, if unsurprising. It concludes that "exposure to violent media increases aggressive cognition, affect, and behavior, and decreases prosocial behavior in the short term. There also appears to be agreement that definitive long-term studies are lacking." It also notes that this sort of response doesn't appear to be significantly different from the response to other forms of media.

In terms of "gaming addiction," the report suggests that it is likely to be a subset of Internet addiction, as it most frequently occurs in players of MMORPGs. In both of these addictions, the current definition is currently informal—the described symptoms actually most closely resemble pathological gambling, rather than an addiction. In either case, the report notes, "there is currently insufficient research to definitively conclude that video game overuse is an addiction."

Given this sort of ambiguity, the report's recommendations are reasonably cautious and recognizes that gaming is simply one form of a suite of related forms of media. It asks public science agencies to "fund research on the long-term beneficial and detrimental effects not only of video games, but use of the Internet by children under 18 years of age." The report calls for the AMA to work with pediatricians and family doctors to make sure the public is aware of their existing recommendations regarding media in general. In this regard, parents should be getting the message that gaming is simply a form of screen time, indistinguishable from TV viewing. Parents should be limiting the total of all forms of screen time, and monitoring the content that appears on screen.

Two recommendations stand out as going beyond reinforcing the obvious, however. First, the AMA is called upon to include Internet/video game addiction as a formally described disorder in its upcoming revision to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This description would include diagnostic criteria, which should improve not only the ability of physicians to treat it but also the ability of researchers study it in a formalized manner.

The other one is the recommendation that the AMA work with the ESRB and other interested parties in improving the game rating system. This call is supported by a citation of studies from Harvard researchers, which have shown the that games rated T(een) and E(veryone) may include thinly-disguised content that would normally limit the game to older audiences (one example given was splattering blood in which red pixels were shifted to a green color). Given that ESRB ratings will almost certainly evolve with changing gaming technology anyway, this recommendation seems to be little more than an attempt to nudge the process forward.

Overall, the committee seems to have produced a fine report that both accurately affects the current state of knowledge and puts the impetus for acting on it where it belongs: on parents, acting in consultation with family physicians.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...addiction.html





Experts Advise on Combating Radicalization
Neil MacFarquhar

While the United States has expended enormous effort in fighting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has neglected the fight for the hearts and minds of young radicals in Internet chat rooms and other places where they cluster, experts on radicalization told a House panel yesterday.

“Unless we can impede radicalization and recruitment, then we are condemned to a strategy of stepping on cockroaches one at a time,” Brian M. Jenkins, a terrorism expert from the Rand Corporation, told the House Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment

The subcommittee and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee have held recent hearings on the possible threat from “homegrown” radicals. The general conclusion has been that although such a threat exists, it is small, especially when compared with Europe, because assimilation works so much better here.

Individual sessions have covered the possibility of terror cells forming in prisons, considered a ripe environment with little concrete activity, and countering the vision of extremists who use Islam to convince the young that suicide bombings are the righteous path to a better world.

“We have to stop attacking only the structure and start attacking their strategy,” the director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, Frank J. Cilluffo, said.

Terrorist organizations, for example, use the Web to glorify the people who carry out attacks as serving God. But, Mr. Cilluffo noted, there is no effort to use video from gruesome attacks like the slaughter of Russian schoolchildren or the bombing of a wedding at a Jordanian hotel to underscore that terrorists are cold-blooded murderers

The United States has had scattered arrests of bumblers who may have intended to carry out terrorist attacks, but none have had the capability to undertake the deadly violence seen on 9/11 or in London and Madrid, witnesses said. The treason indictment last year of Adam Yahiye Gadahn, a Californian who is a Qaeda spokesman, is a rarity. The United States has had about 30 treason cases.

But the Internet age can make moving from intent to capability rapid. So the goal is to block the path and undermine the desire.

“There is nothing wrong with people being recruited to become Muslims,” Representative Jane Harman, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the subcommittees, said in an interview yesterday. “What is wrong is when people who are becoming Muslims are manipulated by radical fanatics into a death cult.

“That small passage that very few of these people take is where we have to interfere. We have to understand how it happens and when it happens.”

Ms. Harman and a Republican colleague, Representative Dave Reichert of Washington, are drafting a measure that would direct Congress to form a commission to develop a strategy for preventing such radicalization. She said she hoped that a similar bill would emerge from the Senate.

Among the major recommendations of the experts at the hearing yesterday were greater involvement of Muslim-Americans in the antiradicalization effort; more aid for community policing, which is deemed most effective at nipping radicalization in the bud; and a smarter focus on countering what Al Qaeda and other groups do to win recruits.

“We need to isolate the extremists as opposed to isolating the mainstream community” of American Muslims, Salam al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said in an interview.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/15/wa...15radical.html





E-voting Reform to be Voted on by the House
By bean

A bill in the House of Representatives threatens to create a major controversy over the conduct of the 2008 election. Several years after its introduction, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act looks like it will finally make it to the floor of the House of Representatives for a vote. At the time of this report, the bill has a whopping 216 bi-partisan cosponsors, and it came out of committee last week and is set for early action on the floor. Because of the shear number of cosponsors, the bill is expected to pass. The bill is written principally by Reps. Zoe Lofgren of San Jose and Rush Holt of New Jersey.

The bill is a response to problems that occurred during the 2006 elections, which included several disputes about the accuracy of new touch screen voting systems in many districts. This legislation would create a much-discussed and increasingly demanded paper trail for elections. The bill would also require a manual audit of every federal election, and it would require the disclosure of voting system source code in limited circumstances.

However, the bill has run into criticism from poll workers and state officials that manage and oversee elections. The National Conference of State Legislatures and the National Association of Counties have declared the bill’s proposed deadlines impossible and the funding inadequate.

The bill has also been criticized by advocates for the physically disabled. The American Association of People with Disabilities has said that the earliest the provisions of the bill could be effectively put into use would be 2014. The officials stated that until then, the bill would essentially be a step back from the 2002 Help America Vote Act that guarantees of equal access.

We at Lawbean strongly support the bill, although we agree that there are shortcomings that need to be addressed. The EFF also endorses the bill, and they have an excellent write-up of what the bill will do and common misconceptions regarding the bill. You can read the bill in its entirety here.
http://www.lawbean.com/2007/06/13/e-...-by-the-house/





Microsoft Finds Legal Defender in Justice Dept.
Stephen LaBaton

Nearly a decade after the government began its landmark effort to break up Microsoft, the Bush administration has sharply changed course by repeatedly defending the company both in the United States and abroad against accusations of anticompetitive conduct, including the recent rejection of a complaint by Google.

The retrenchment reflects a substantially different view of antitrust policy, as well as a recognition of major changes in the marketplace. The battlefront among technology companies has shifted from computer desktop software, a category that Microsoft dominates, to Internet search and Web-based software programs that allow users to bypass products made by Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker.

In the most striking recent example of the policy shift, the top antitrust official at the Justice Department last month urged state prosecutors to reject a confidential antitrust complaint filed by Google that is tied to a consent decree that monitors Microsoft’s behavior. Google has accused Microsoft of designing its latest operating system, Vista, to discourage the use of Google’s desktop search program, lawyers involved in the case said.

The official, Thomas O. Barnett, an assistant attorney general, had until 2004 been a top antitrust partner at the law firm that has represented Microsoft in several antitrust disputes. At the firm, Justice Department officials said, he never worked on Microsoft matters. Still, for more than a year after arriving at the department, he removed himself from the case because of conflict of interest issues. Ethics lawyers ultimately cleared his involvement.

Mr. Barnett’s memo dismissing Google’s claims, sent to state attorneys general around the nation, alarmed many of them, they and other lawyers from five states said. Some state officials said they believed that Google’s complaint had merit. They also said that they could not recall receiving a request by any head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division to drop any inquiry.

Mr. Barnett’s memo appears to have backfired, state officials said. Prosecutors from several states said they intended to pursue the Google accusations with or without the federal government. In response, federal prosecutors are now discussing with the states whether the Justice Department will join them in pursuing the Google complaint.

The complaint, which contends that Google’s desktop search tool is slowed down by Microsoft’s competing program, has not been made public by Google or the judge overseeing the Microsoft consent decree, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the Federal District Court in Washington. It is expected to be discussed at a hearing on the decree in front of Judge Kollar-Kotelly this month.

The memo illustrates the political transformation of Microsoft, as well as the shift in antitrust policy between officials appointed by President Bill Clinton and by President Bush.

“With the change in administrations there has been a sharp falling away from the concerns about how Microsoft and other large companies use their market power,” said Harry First, a professor at the New York University School of Law and the former top antitrust lawyer for New York State who is writing a book about the Microsoft case. “The administration has been very conservative and far less concerned about single-firm dominant behavior than previous administrations.”

Ricardo Reyes, a spokesman for Google, declined to comment about the complaint.

Bradford L. Smith, the general counsel at Microsoft, said that the company was unaware of Mr. Barnett’s memo. He said that Microsoft had not violated the consent decree and that it had already made modifications to Vista in response to concerns raised by Google and other companies.

He said that the new operating system was carefully designed to work well with rival software products and that an independent technical committee that works for the Justice Department and the states had spent years examining Vista for possible anticompetitive problems before it went on sale.

He said that even though the consent decree did not oblige Microsoft to make changes to Vista in response to Google’s complaint, Microsoft lawyers and engineers had been working closely with both state and federal officials in recent days in search of an accommodation.

“We’ve made a decision to go the extra mile to be reasonable,” Mr. Smith said. “The discussions between the company and the various government agencies have been quite fruitful.”

Microsoft was saved from being split in half by a federal appeals court decision handed down early in the Bush administration. The ruling, in 2001, found that the company had repeatedly abused its monopoly power in the software business, but it reversed a lower court order sought by the Clinton administration to split up the company.

Google complained to federal and state prosecutors that consumers who try to use its search tool for computer hard drives on Vista were frustrated because Vista has a competing desktop search program that cannot be turned off. When the Google and Vista search programs are run simultaneously on a computer, their indexing programs slow the operating system considerably, Google contended. As a result, Google said that Vista violated Microsoft’s 2002 antitrust settlement, which prohibits Microsoft from designing operating systems that limit the choices of consumers.

Google has asked the court overseeing the antitrust decree to order Microsoft to redesign Vista to enable users to turn off its built-in desktop search program so that competing programs could function better, officials said.

State officials said that Mr. Barnett’s memo rejected the Google complaint, repeating legal arguments made by Microsoft.

Before he joined the Justice Department in 2004, Mr. Barnett had been vice chairman of the antitrust department at Covington & Burling. It represented Microsoft in the antitrust case and continues to represent the company.

In a recent interview, Mr. Barnett declined to discuss the Google complaint, noting that the decree requires complaints by companies to be kept confidential. He defended the federal government’s overall handling of the Microsoft case.

“The purpose of the consent decree was to prevent and prohibit Microsoft from certain exclusionary behavior that was anticompetitive in nature,” Mr. Barnett said. “It was not designed to pick who would win or determine who would have what market share.”

“We want to prevent Microsoft from doing those things that exclude competitors,” he added. “We also don’t want to disrupt the market in a way that will be harmful to consumers. What does that mean? We’ve never tried to prevent any company, including Microsoft, from innovating and improving its products in a way that will be a benefit to consumers.”

Prosecutors from several states said that they believed that Google’s complaint about anticompetitive conduct resembled the complaint raised by Netscape, a company that popularized the Web browser, that was the basis of the 1998 lawsuit.

Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, declined to talk about the substance of the complaint, or which company made it. But he said the memo from Mr. Barnett surprised him.

“Eyebrows were raised by this letter in our group, as much by the substance and tone as by the past relationship the author had had with Microsoft,” said Mr. Blumenthal, one of the few state prosecutors who has been involved in the case since its outset.

“In concept, if not directly word for word, it is the Microsoft-Netscape situation,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “The question is whether we’re seeing déjà vu all over again.”

The administration has supported Microsoft in other antitrust skirmishes as well.

Last year, for instance, the United States delegation to the European Union complained to European regulators that Microsoft had been denied access to evidence it needed to defend itself in an investigation there into possible anticompetitive conduct. The United States delegation is led by Ambassador C. Boyden Gray, who had worked for Microsoft as a lawyer and lobbyist.

Robert Gianfrancesco, a spokesman for the delegation, said that Ambassador Gray had not formally removed himself from involvement in Microsoft issues but was not involved in the complaint to European regulators, which was handled by other American diplomats in the delegation.

In December 2005, the Justice Department sharply criticized the Korean Fair Trade Commission after that agency ordered major changes in Microsoft’s marketing practices in Korea.

And in 2004, the Justice Department criticized the European Commission for punishing Microsoft for including its video and audio player with its operating system.

Antitrust experts attribute the Bush administration’s different approach to Microsoft to a confluence of political forces as well as significant changes in the marketplace.

A big factor has been the Bush administration’s hands-off approach to business regulation. For its part, Microsoft, which spent more than $55 million on lobbying activities in Washington from 2000 to 2006 and substantially more on lawyers, has become a more effective lobbying organization.

“The generous and noncynical view is that there has been a fundamental change in philosophy about the degree to which antitrust should be used to regulate business activity,” said Andrew I. Gavil, an antitrust law professor at Howard University who is a co-author of the Microsoft book with Professor First, the New York University law professor. “In the Microsoft case, you can see how that change has manifested itself.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/bu...microsoft.html





Kamloops School District Gets an Education in Free Software
Bruce Byfield

The Kamloops/Thompson School District in British Columbia, Canada, is a free software success story. Gregg Ferrie, manager of information technology for the district, believes its infrastructure may be "the largest Linux on-the-desktop implementation in Western Canada" in public education. According to Ferrie, hardly a week goes by without another of British Columbia's more than 60 school districts consulting Kamloops. Currently, five other districts are considering or planning to implement the Kamloops district's custom-built thin client solution, and the department of education at the University of British Columbia is also investigating the possibility.

Kamloops' success did not come overnight. It represents a culmination of almost a decade of effort that includes resistance from both instructors and unionized technical staff. Ferrie's account of how he and his small team of system analysts managed to introduce free software to the district provides a case study of the challenges that others might face in making similar efforts.

Administration and elementary school conversion

The Kamloops district's transition to free software began in the late 1990s. As problems with the district's Windows-Novell system mounted, Ferrie began to look for alternatives to improve the centralized administration of the system. At the time, Ferrie had some experience with Xenix, and says that, "I loved the Unix command line. It wasn't pretty, but it was powerful." His investigation of GNU/Linux convinced him that it was "a little immature," but adequate for basic computing. With the help of a local service provider, and John Cuzzola, a systems analyst he soon hired, in the 2000-01 school year, he migrated the administration system.

Because the change occurred behind the scenes, Ferrie says, "It was an absolute non-issue, because no one knew anything about it." Besides, at the time, computers were considered enrichment rather than part of the core curriculum. "If a Web site went down," Ferrie says, "nobody cared, because it wasn't really a big issue."

Around the same time that this transition was completed, Ferrie's team began tackling the problem of providing services to all the elementary schools in the district. The elementaries suffered from a "huge variance of technology" ranging from no computers at all through to networked labs, and even those that were well equipped were suffering from frequent equipment failures. Ferrie remembers that if a teacher "brought in a whole class of 30 kids, if they had 26 computers they would be doing well. That meant that teachers had to double up kids or make other arrangements for some kids, which is always problematic."

Over the summer of 2001, Cuzzola worked on modifying the Linux Terminal Server Project to develop a thin client system for the district's elementary schools. The original plan was to run a pilot for a year at a couple of schools, but the solution was so successful that by October of the next school year, teachers at other elementary schools were coming to inspect it. By the end of the school year, the system was installed in 20 other schools. By the end of the next year, all the district's elementary schools had it.

"The software was a bit of a stumbling block, because it wasn't terribly mature in some areas," Ferrie says, "but it was reliable." This reliability "was better than what [some schools] had, which was nothing." But even for those schools that already had an IT infrastructure, a system that teachers could count on was more important than the imperfections of the software.

Resistance from teachers

Buoyed by these early successes, Ferrie and his analysts decided to migrate the secondary schools over to free software in 2002-03. Here, however, trouble quickly arose because, unlike in the elementary schools, in the secondary schools, the analysts were changing a well-established order.

The secondary schools used computers as part of their core curriculum, and some of the teaching staff saw the change as the IT department interfering in educational matters that its members didn't understand. Moreover, although secondary schools in British Columbia are supposed to teach skills rather than specific software, in practice, many teachers had developed courses that specified particular pieces of software. "You get a teacher who's been around 20-30 years, and they're not that keen on developing their course again," Ferrie says in wry hindsight. Also, many schools had already paid for textbooks that referred to specific proprietary software.

However, resistance among educators crumbled with the emergence of an advocate of the new system. In 2005, Dean Coder, a principal from the Prince George district with whom Ferrie had corresponded, transferred to the Kamloops district because he wanted to become involved in its transition to free software. Assigned to Barriere secondary school, Coder decided to convert all 110 computers at the school over to the thin client system. Systems analyst Dean Montgomery began work on a second-generation system, using state-of-the-art equipment.

By this point, applications such as OpenOffice.org and Scribus had evolved to the point that teachers were "awestruck" by the new pilot system. However, what really convinced teachers that the change was worthwhile, Ferrie says, was Coder's advocacy. "He put his own reputation on the line and said to the staff, 'I'm going to be there for you.'" A young principal at the district's largest school soon requested the new system, and several others quickly followed. Now, Ferrie says, "we're struggling to implement it at the rest of our secondaries." In the end, an advocate who was both an educator and an administrator, he maintains, made all the difference in getting the system accepted.

IT staff issues

Another serious problem in the Kamloops district was resistance from the technical support staff. Ferrie is reluctant to talk about this resistance, not wanting to reopen conflicts that have since been resolved. Still, he admits that at the time, "We had a lot of difficulty moving our Novell-trained technicians forward. For a start, they were skeptical that an open source project could do the job -- and that was understandable, since they hadn't been exposed to it. As well, they had a huge skill set that they had developed for years and years that suddenly became irrelevant, and they had to retrain. And there was a lot of anxiety about that."

One or two employees considered quitting. At times, resistance became so pronounced that some of the staff seemed to be passively resisting the changes, muttering in the background and dragging their feet when asked to cooperate. There were even union grievances filed about unnecessary system changes and the need for retraining.

"From a management perspective, it was debilitating and counterproductive," Ferrie recalls. However, looking back, he places the blame for the staff issues squarely on himself and the other administrators.

"We didn't do a very good job of promoting the system," he says. "We kind of just expected that [the staff] would see the wisdom of it without understanding it very well. We were dealing with people, not machines, and one lesson I learned is that people are still the biggest component, and you've got to engage them. In all fairness, we were asking them to do a lot."

As Ferrie and other administrators realized the problems their overenthusiasm had created, they began to work with the IT staff rather than seeking confrontation. And, slowly, the staff came around. The district paid $25,000 Canadian to bring in a trainer for two weeks, and paid for staff members to take the Linux Professional Institute Level 2 tests. "It gives them somewhere to hang their hat," Ferrie says, explaining why the district paid for staff certification. "It's something you can take to the bank" and use in other jobs. For a year and a half, staff also had half a day off every week for personal study to hone their skills.

With this level of support, resentment of the changes slowly diminished. In the end, no one quit. Now, the battles of the past safely behind, Ferrie has nothing but praise for his staff for working through the conflict and learning new skills."Even the technicians who struggled a little bit initially are very good," Ferrie says. "They're phenomenal now. Once we really got through all the angst and the problems and sat down and did some serious planning for them, everything started to go great."

Finding solutions

The second-generation system cost the Kamloops district about $47,000 to implement, as well as the cost of training and the release time for personal study and taking exams. However, Ferrie has no doubt of the savings overall. License costs are disappearing as the district phases out its Novell NetWare licenses, and the district no longer needs to purchase productivity software. Ferrie also figures that the increased reliability represents a substantial savings, although he admits that it is hard to quantify.

However, perhaps the greatest benefit of switching to free software is that the reliability of the new system frees up technical staff to do more than routine support. Where the district once paid 10 technicians to keep the district's computers running, many of those can now be freed for other duties. Since implementing the second-generation system at Barriere Secondary, the district has been able to create a new help desk position to work directly with teachers so that they can make better use of applications. Recently, too, the district has improved the new position of technology coordinator to offer teachers hardware support.

"We could never do any of that before," Ferrie says. "We're making much better use of the few resources we have." That, as much as anything, seems to make the effort of the last decade worthwhile for Ferrie and his team.
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/05/25/1536219





It's Time to Consider Open Source Software
Jay Pfaffman

Free software gives everyone the freedom to run, study, change and redistribute software. It is these freedoms, not the price, that is important about free software. Free software advocates make the distinction between free, as in speech, as opposed to free, as in beer. Though many people would gladly accept a free beer, it is not one of the fundamental principles of democracy.

The HP ProLiant DL360 G5 server pinpoints problems earlier with Systems Insight Manager software -- and Integrated Lights-Out Management lets you manage multiple operating systems remotely.

In 1985, Richard Stallman, a computer programmer, released "The GNU Manifesto," in which he proclaimed a golden rule: One must share computer programs. Software vendors required him to agree to license agreements that forbade sharing programs with others, but he refused to "break solidarity" with other computer users whom he assumed also wanted to use free software.

Many people are surprised to hear that Stallman's free software dream has been realized. This paper makes the case that using only free software has considerable economic, technical, political, pedagogical and moral advantages -- and surprisingly few frustrations. If you are a teacher, and especially if you train teachers, you should be aware that there are Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) applications for common classroom uses.

F/OSS is the foundation of the Internet. The BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) name server that maps domain names to Internet Protocol (IP) numbers, the Apache Web server that serves most Web sites, the Linux kernel that drives Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) , and the MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia are all free for anyone to use, change and redistribute.

These examples demonstrate that F/OSS tools can be the best solution in certain situations, but for those working in K-12 classrooms these server-based examples are easily dismissed as esoteric or unimportant. In recent years, however, open source software developers have released a wide range of end-user applications that can replace most of the applications currently used in K-12 classrooms.

The Power of the Source

A key aspect of F/OSS is the availability of the source code -- the human-readable text files used to create the program. Accessing the source code allows anyone to examine the program to see how it works, fix bugs or change it to suit personal needs. Like freedom of speech, one does not need to use source code to benefit from it.

Free software gives everyone the freedom to run, study, change and redistribute software. It is these freedoms, not the price, that is important about free software. Free software advocates make the distinction between free, as in speech, as opposed to free, as in beer. Though many people would gladly accept a free beer, it is not one of the fundamental principles of democracy.

Property Rights Turned Upside Down

Those of us who have long been familiar with open source software need to understand that the concept of free software is foreign to many people. The conventional notion of property rights is that I have the right to exclude you from using something that belongs to me.

Open source software is based on the opposite belief -- that everyone has the right to distribute and no one has the right to exclude further distribution. This paradigm shift can be difficult to make. For three years, F/OSS has been a central part of my course on using computers in the classroom, and I give conference presentations about F/OSS at least twice a year. I was getting good at it.

Recently I gave a conference presentation about the benefits of F/OSS for educators -- how all teachers and students could use these tools and that they were free and would remain so. I distributed copies of TheOpenCD and talked about the F/OSS programs that it includes. Near the end of the hour-long presentation, a participant raised her hand and asked, "So I can use this software for free?" Even after an hour, F/OSS still did not quite make sense to her.

On the Annoyances of Proprietary Software

Proprietary software is inconvenient. It is inconvenient to purchase additional licenses when you buy new machines. It is inconvenient to negotiate a new license agreement each year. It is inconvenient to support multiple versions of a package for machines purchased at different times.

It is inconvenient to be faced with an ethical dilemma when a friend or colleague asks to illegally copy the proprietary software that you support. It is inconvenient for students not to have the same software at home and at school.

It is inconvenient to decide what to do when a vendor starts charging for a proprietary program that was previously free. It is inconvenient to perform an audit to document that all software on every computer has a valid license. Thanks to the work of Stallman and thousands of others, these inconveniences are now avoidable.

Understanding Open Source Software

This section addresses questions and concerns that I hear from students in my instructional technology courses as well as from teachers and technology leaders that I meet in conference presentations.

Myth: You get what you pay for.

With traditionally distributed software you pay for packaging; you pay for manuals; you pay for marketing ; you pay for support, regardless of whether you receive it; you pay for programmers; you pay dividends to shareholders. You may get what you pay for, but someone else decides the cost. With open source software you can still pay for those things, but you control who and how much to pay.

Myth: F/OSS software is created by amateurs and must be inferior.

Two fallacies follow from this assumption. First, that open source applications are not developed by professional programmers. second, that amateur programmers produce inferior work.

Many F/OSS projects have teams of professional programmers. Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) software distributes a version of GNU/Linux, an open source operating system that for many people obviates the need for Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows. Other projects, like Firefox and OpenOffice.org, are based on commercially developed code (StarOffice and Netscape Navigator, respectively) that was subsequently released as open source. Both of these projects have improved dramatically since becoming F/OSS.

Economists are starting to recognize the impact of ProAms -- people who do high quality work in a field other than the one that earns them their money. Amateur astronomers regularly make new discoveries. Amateur musicians and songwriters generate money for coffee houses and bars. Einstein wrote several of his most famous papers while he worked in a patent office. So it is with software. Many people develop software because they enjoy it. Some do it for the respect they gain in online communities that form around the creation of open source applications.

Myth: With F/OSS I cannot get support.

This myth follows from the assumption that when you pay for something you have certain rights and expectations. Though this may be true for physical objects, most software licenses exclude you from such rights. For example, Microsoft's End User License Agreement (EULA) explicitly states that there is no warranty after 90 days.

Most often when one needs help to learn to use or configure a piece of proprietary commercial software, the best option is a third party. The first place most teachers go for support is to experts in the building. What happens, then, when the person being asked for help has a different version of the program in question than the person asking the question? F/OSS makes this situation unnecessary since there are no license restrictions keeping everyone from upgrading to the same version simultaneously.

Myth: Moving to F/OSS will require retraining and relearning.

Since Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) published user interface standards, many of which were quickly copied by Microsoft, most computer applications work similarly. For the most common operations, it makes little difference whether one uses ooWriter, AbiWord, Google Documents or any of several versions of Microsoft Word.

People are often reluctant to try new computer programs, though most users find only subtle differences between one program and another. In the course of giving conference presentations about F/OSS, two computer coordinators shared stories of upgrading some users' Microsoft Office suite with OpenOffice.org, leaving Microsoft Office icons as the means to start OpenOffice.org. In both cases, most users failed to notice that they were no longer using Microsoft Office.

Myth: Students need to learn the standard applications.

Schools have a responsibility to give students the skills they need to succeed. By the time high school students get to the job market, today's applications will be antiquated. Students need to know how to use word processors to communicate and spreadsheets to explore numbers and graphs. Their technical skills should transcend the particular idiosyncrasies of the applications. http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/57759.html

Training teachers and students to use a piece of software makes that software more valuable. Vendors know this. Business sense, not altruism, is what drives deep discounts on software for education. I once spoke to a vendor of an online grade book who, upon learning that I train teachers, was very interested in my using it in my classes.

Barracuda Networks' high-end, low-cost Spam Firewalls and Web Filters are trusted by over 40,000 customers worldwide – including IBM®, NASA and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security – to stop spam, spyware, viruses and other security threats. Shouldn't you? Request a free evaluation unit today.

Educators Pay for Software - Twice

Unlike diamonds, software applications are more valuable when more people have them. This is among the reasons that Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Office is so popular. Everyone uses it because everyone uses it. When enough of your friends upgrade to a newer version that makes files that you can't read, you upgrade too.

Training teachers and students to use a piece of software makes that software more valuable. Vendors know this. Business sense, not altruism, is what drives deep discounts on software for education. I once spoke to a vendor of an online grade book who, upon learning that I train teachers, was very interested in my using it in my classes.

"What does it cost?" I asked.

"It will cost you nothing. You can use it for free for as long as you like."

"And once I addict my students to your software," I asked pointedly, afraid that I was being rude, "what will it cost them?"

The vendor became excited. "That's exactly what we were talking about in our last sales meeting!"

When technology leaders train teachers and students to use proprietary software, it obligates those teachers and students to buy or steal that software or to have wasted their time on the training. A US$500 Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) computer costs another $150 (an additional 30 percent) with Microsoft Office Basic; the version for students and teachers is available for about $100 (20 percent).

When one considers how many students and teachers buy Microsoft Office because their school has standardized on it the costs are considerable. A medium-sized school district comprises about 20,000 households with children; if 10 percent of them spend $100 to help their students do better in school by buying the software that the school is using, the district has spent $20,000 of its constituents' money. Whether schools should be effectively taxing its constituents in this way is an issue that deserves more attention.

Training Teachers on Tools They Do Not Have

Though it is a safe bet that students will have the skills they need to access certain proprietary tools like an office suite wherever they go -- and that these skills are fairly interchangeable between competing applications -- software for photo editing, desktop publishing, Web editing, statistics and symbolic mathematics are not so widely available. There are dramatic advantages to arming students with tools that assure them access wherever they go.

Teacher educators cannot ensure that teachers will have the hardware that they need to integrate technology into their teaching, but we can provide them with tools that they will have the right to use in perpetuity. Teachers spend their own money for supplies like pencils and paper; encouraging them to spend money on software when free alternatives are available is unnecessary.

On the Allure of Free Proprietary Tools

Some proprietary applications have "free" versions with fewer features, allow "free" use for education, provide a "free" limited use version, or are simply available free of charge, but they are not Free. F/OSS licenses guarantee that the software will be freely available forever. When software is free, but not Free, things can change. My university adopted a file transfer program that was free for educational use, but the company later changed its policy and started charging for the software.

A free-of-cost program that I once used to control CD changers became unavailable when the company producing it was purchased by Microsoft. Some free-of-charge programs are likely to be free forever. Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) Reader, for example, will likely remain free since its large user base is what makes Adobe's PDF-producing applications marketable. Even these programs, however, restrict your rights to redistribute the software.

The following section includes examples of F/OSS that all technology educators should know about and make known to their students. Most of these can be used as drop-in replacements for their proprietary alternatives.

Productivity Applications

Perhaps the most important applications are those that allow students and teachers to create papers, pictures and sounds and manipulate numbers. The Microsoft Office suite is the de facto standard. In the past few years, however, OpenOffice.org's suite has matured considerably.

The feature that it lacks that is most likely to be a problem is a grammar checker; other than that for most tasks, it is quite capable. Computerworld suggests that it will be easier for many users to adopt OpenOffice.org than the forthcoming Office 12. For those with older slower computers or the need for a grammar checker, AbiWord, is a good option. It lacks some features of OpenOffice.org's ooWriter, but for most needs, it is quite sufficient.

The GNU Image Manipulation Program (the GIMP) is a very capable photo editing package. It has similar features to Photoshop, but a different menu structure. For those who already know how Photoshop has things arranged, another set of programmers has re-arranged the GIMP's menus in a program they call GIMPShop.

Inkscape is a vector-based drawing program that is not yet as full-featured as its proprietary counterparts, but is quite capable for a wide range of tasks. For those interested in 3-D modeling, rendering and animation, Blender offers many of the features provided by very expensive packages. Since such a specialized program is likely to be used by only a few students, it can be an attractive option. Tux Paint is a paint program with stamps and sounds for younger kids, somewhat similar to KidPix. It has an easy-to-use interface and saves files without the bother of file names.

Nvu is an HTML editor that is based on code from Mozilla . One of its best features is a simple tool for managing a remote Web site. Nvu is more than adequate for the kinds of Web pages that most K-12 teachers and students need to create. Like other HTML editors, it has multiple views, allowing users to edit HTML by hand or use word processor-like commands to effect the same results.

Scribus is a desktop publishing package that is quite mature. In addition to the expected desktop publishing features, Scribus can also create animated and interactive PDFs. PDFCreator installs as a printer driver for those who need to create simple PDFs, allowing any Windows program that can print to create PDFs. Audacity is an easy-to-use digital audio editing program that has become popular for podcasting, though it is also capable of doing multi-track digital recording work.

Freemind is a Java-based open source concept mapping tool. It does not offer as many pictures as its proprietary counterpart, but does allow publishing maps to a Web page. CmapTools is another free concept mapping package. It is not Free or open source, but is distributed by a university rather than a commercial entity; it could, therefore, become unavailable in the future.

Internet Applications

Firefox is a Web browser that includes features not found in Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE). It is also generally recognized to be less susceptible to viruses than is IE. Firefox has an easy-to-use mechanism for installing add-ons (or extensions), and the open source community has responded by developing hundreds of them. Adblock Plus, for example, will remove ads from Web pages, reducing download time and distractions.

Gaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client. It can connect to all of the most popular IM networks, obviating the need to install separate clients for each. Adium uses some of the code from Gaim for a similar application for the Macintosh . Schools that would like to have teachers or students use IM but want control over who can use the service should investigate Jabber, an open IM protocol with cross platform server applications. This software enables schools to provide IM service with complete control over who can participate.

WinSCPand FileZilla are FTP and SCP clients for Windows. Unlike many other free FTP clients, they have no license reminders to annoy users or expirations that require reinstallation. Cyberduck is an FTP/SFTP client for the Mac that will also synchronize local and remote folders. Fugu is an SCP front end for the Mac with drag-and-drop support and the ability to upload entire folders.

Many of the applications mentioned thus far are also available as portable applications. These are special versions designed to run from a USB drive. This enables users to carry their data and their applications and their settings with them. For example, Portable Firefox allows users not only to use Firefox on computers that do not have Firefox installed, but also to have their bookmarks, add-ons and other settings with them.

Content-Specific Applications

Axiom and Maxima are computer algebra systems that will do symbolic calculations and create graphs. Yacas is another such system that can also be run in a Web browser. Sage will run in a Web browser and provides a bootable CD that will set up one computer as a server, allowing other computers in the school to use Sage via a Web browser.

For those interested in teaching or learning astronomy, Celestia and Stellarium are exciting programs. Stellarium is a computer-based planetarium that will show the stars just as they are in the sky. Celestia will simulate moving around the galaxy, showing planets and their orbits.

Server-Based Applications

Course management systems like WebCT and Blackboard are ubiquitous in colleges of education, but expensive to buy and cumbersome to maintain. Moodle provides an alternative that is easier and requires less training for the teacher, the student and the technology support department.

Though Moodle is designed as a platform for online courses, it also makes it easy for K-12 teachers to create Web sites for their courses, letting students, parents and other teachers know what is going on in their classes. Moodle is a Web-based application, so teachers can update their site anywhere without installing or configuring HTML editing software. Because Moodle is not only free but also requires little support, my university is able to provide Moodle sites for any school -- or teacher -- who asks. Students in my class who create course content in Moodle know that they can move it to their own Moodle server to use with their own students.

Because Moodle is easy to run and will work on Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux servers, several of my students have introduced Moodle to their schools and had their school or district adopt it. Sakai, developed by a consortium of schools including Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , is another course management system that is somewhat more powerful but considerably more difficult to install and configure.

Other interesting server-based applications include Koha and OpenBiblio, integrated library systems capable of managing any K-12 school's collection. SquirrelMail is a very usable Web-based mail system.

In Short

Because it is the norm in most schools, businesses and homes, many of the costs of proprietary software are difficult to see. There are now alternatives to the most commonly used applications in schools. When these open source alternatives are nearly equal to -- or better than -- their proprietary competitors, the significant advantages of F/OSS make them the better choice.

When making the decision to license a proprietary product schools need to carefully consider whether their needs may be better met by open source alternatives.
http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/57760.html





Red Hat Linux Gets Top Government Security Rating

Red Hat Linux received a new level of security certification that should make the software appealing to government agencies.
Robert McMillan

Red Hat Linux has received a new level of security certification that should make the software more appealing to some government agencies.

Last week IBM Corp. was able to achieve EAL4 Augmented with ALC_FLR.3 certification for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, putting it on a par with Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Trusted Solaris operating system, said Dan Frye, vice president of open systems with IBM.

"This is the highest level of security function that anybody has," Frye said. "We have delivered LSPP functionality in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and we have certified that at the EAL4 level of assurance."

This rating is awarded by the government-funded National Information Assurance Partnership's (NIAP) Common Criteria Evaluation and Validation Scheme for IT Security program, which evaluates the security of commercial technology products.

Red Hat Linux has been certified EAL4 Augmented with ALC_FLR.3 on IBM's mainframe, System x, System p5 and eServer systems.

This level of security certification is not usually required for enterprise contracts, but it is mandatory for some programs within government agencies such as the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. National Security Agency, Frye said.

Linux had already been certified at the EAL4 level, but this is the first time that the operating system has received the Labeled Security Protection Profile (LSPP) certification, which relates to its access-control features.

Linux developers have been working to add these "SE Linux" access control features into the operating system for several years now. SE Linux shipped as part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and now it has been certified for government use, Frye said. "You now have a level of fine-grained control for everybody," he added. "You can set security based on groups or based on individuals."

In addition to LSPP Red Hat Linux has also been certified with Role Based Access Control Protection (RBAC), and that too is noteworthy, said Red Hat Inc.

"Historically, OS vendors have required you buy a separate branched OS to get something that is LSPP and RBAC certified," the company said in a statement. "This is something completely unique for commercial operating systems because the support for multilevel security is native to the OS."

According to Frye, the certification is "big news for the Linux industry" because it shows that open-source software can be used for sensitive computing tasks. "If anyone had any doubts that you could do this with an open-source operating system, we've proved them wrong."
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,13...t/article.html





Wireless networks: The burning questions

What Impact Will 802.11n Have? Which Security Threats are Scariest? What of Wireless VoIP?
John Cox

Wireless networks might be mainstream across enterprise networks, but that doesn’t mean they’re no-brainers. Here, we’ve raised and attempted to answer some of the thornier questions you might still be dealing with.

How will 802.11n high-throughput wireless LANs affect the corporate net?

A surprising number of wireless LAN vendors have recently announced enterprise access points based on the draft IEEE 802.11n standard, promising throughput of 100M to 200Mbps per frequency band, or from three to six times that of today’s 11g and 11a nets.

Whether network managers opt for the draft 11n products, certified interoperable by the Wi-Fi Alliance, or wait for the final IEEE ratification in late 2008 or early 2009, they could face any of these four issues: overloading part of the wired infrastructure; overloading existing, older wireless LAN switches; forcing an upgrade to higher-powered Power-over-Ethernet; and repositioning and rewiring some number of existing wireless access points.

Most of the new access points will come with one or even two Gigabit Ethernet ports. “We’re mostly ‘100 meg’ to our buildings,” says Michael Dickson, network analyst at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “[For 11n,], we'll need gigabit switches in the closet with 10-gigabit uplinks. That’s a definite cost, almost a necessary cost for 11n.”

“11n adds an incentive to go to ‘gigE’ [in the wired infrastructure],” says Craig Mathias, principal with Farpoint Group.

One related issue with upgrading a cable plant, given the capacity of 11n, is whether to upgrade the Ethernet wall jacks, a decision about whether the wireless infrastructure becomes the principal means of network access.

If existing wireless LAN controllers also lack the net capacity, and the needed processing power and memory to handle the increased traffic, they’ll have to be replaced, especially if the vendor has a purely centralized architecture with every packet running from each access point to the controller. Vendors have been upgrading their controllers over the past year with 11n in mind, sometimes also offloading the packet switching functions to the access points, creating a distributed data plane.

“With this kind of distributed data plane, there’s no bottleneck at the controller,” says Mathias. “If you have Meru or Extricom, you have centralized data and control planes. But if you design the box to handle whatever is thrown at it, it’s not a problem.”

Benchmarking wireless performance to verify such things as workloads and traffic conditions is likely to become much more important for 11n nets. To do this, enterprises or systems integrators will use complex performance-testing tools, such as those from VeriWave and Azimuth Systems, which previously had been used mainly by radio chip makers and equipment manufacturers. “This will be a big thing down the road,” Mathias predicts.

The Power over Ethernet (PoE) issue may catch some users by surprise. “The PoE infrastructure may have its upper limits tested by 11n deployments [that are] used to their maximum capabilities,” says Chris Silva, analyst at Forrester Research.

PoE lets you run just one cable between switch and access point, instead of two, potentially a big cost saving. But the 11n access points draw more electricity than the 15.4 watts maximum provided by power injectors based on the IEEE 802.3af standard. That will at least double with a new standard, 802.3at, now being finalized. At least one vendor, Trapeze, has created new code that can let its just-announced 11n access point make use of existing PoE injectors, but there are tradeoffs in terms of performance.

“The promise of 11n is more than simply going faster,” says Phil Belanger, managing director for Novarum. “The increased range of 11n will make it more practical to deploy large systems using the 5-GHz band, which has many more channels than the 2.4-GHz and has not been used very much to date. That, in turn, will enable much higher capacity wireless LANs. For many enterprises, a wireless network that delivers hundreds of megabits of capacity everywhere will be good enough to be the only network.”

What's the biggest looming wireless/mobile security threat?

We’ve identified three, but we’ll treat one of them (denial of service)

The other two threats are emblematic of two very different human dynamics: one springs from the increasing cunning of attackers, the other from the continuing ignorance of users and even IT professionals about the nature of wireless threats.

Gartner says:

• Evaluate cellular data plans as alternative to public Wi-Fi hotspot access in hotels and coffee shops.
• Equip wireless laptops with a personal firewall that enforces security policies.
• Scan and update laptops with revised security settings, software patches, and updated antivirus and antispyware applications.
• Consider "connection agent" corporate packages, such as those offered by iBahn, T-Mobile, iPass, Fiberlink Communications and others: a small agent running on the laptop with advanced security protocols for two-way authentication.
• Protect access to corporate network by remote workers using personal PCs with on-demand security tools over SSL VPNs.
• Authenticate users with two strong factors. Ideally, one factor should be a one-time password.
• Use VoIP only over a VPN.

In 2006, researchers identified problems with wireless interface device drivers that could be exploited in various ways by attackers. Drivers function at the level of the operating system kernel, where malicious code potentially has access to all parts of the system.

Typically, these driver vulnerabilities involve manipulating the lengths of specific pieces of information contained in the wireless management frames, causing a buffer overflow where a malicious payload can be executed, according to Andrew Lockhart, security analyst with Network Chemistry.

“A driver will process these data elements whether or not [the adapter is] associated with an access point. So the combination of simply having a powered-on wireless card with a vulnerable driver can leave a user open to attack,” he says.

The obvious solution is to replace the vulnerable drivers. But that is an ad hoc process. “In the Windows world, most wireless drivers are part of a third-party software package, so they don’t get updated with a Windows update, which makes it troublesome to eliminate the problem, and it will likely be a problem for a while,” he says.

Attackers are becoming smarter about what and how they attack, increasingly using evasion tactics to sidestep or confuse wireless intrusion detection/prevention applications (IDS/IPS). The long-term solution is smarter IDS/IPS systems that can more comprehensively monitor and analyze wireless traffic and behaviors. But researchers, such as those at Dartmouth College’s Project MAP (for measure, analyze and protect) are only in the early stages of such work.

The second wireless threat is related to the fact that many mobile users seem to be not getting smarter about wireless security.

“The biggest threat is people who use open Wi-Fi access points and don’t use encryption or VPNs,” says David Kotz, Dartmouth professor of computer science and one of the lead Project MAP researchers. “They trust some random hot spot operator or open access point somewhere with their personal or professional data. People are careless.”

That’s putting it diplomatically.

Security consultant Winn Schwartau likes to tell how his then-12-year-old son used a Windows-based Palm Treo to wirelessly eavesdrop on business executives using laptops or PDAs on an airport or other public Wi-Fi net. He routinely collected username/password combinations to corporate nets. “My son had passwords to 40 of the Fortune 100 [nets],” he says.

The key vulnerability was these users, even if they used an encrypted VPN tunnel to access the corporate net, repeatedly used an unencrypted wireless link to access Internet mail or other Web sites in the clear, allowing the younger Schwartau to collect information to access the user’s Web mail account. He then used it to send the user an e-mail from his own account. “I can then infect that machine [with malicious code], and have access to your VPN account,” Schwartau says.

The inverse of this problem is allowing personal mobile devices, which have been exposed to the Internet in the wild, to connect to corporate nets. “Normal security standards and procedures are often ignored when users are allowed to connect their own devices,” says Lora Mellies, information security officer at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. “For instance, there may be no scheme to regularly back up the information, no firewall or antivirus protection installed, and no use of encryption for confidentiality or [of] tokens/certificates for strong authentication.”

“No one can define the perimeter [of the corporate net] anymore,” says Schwartau. “The rule is: ‘Thou shalt connect nowhere except to the corporate network; once you’re there, you can do whatever you want, but we’ll be watching you.’”

This threat will only get worse as the number of ill-trained mobile users grows, along with the ballooning amount of sensitive or proprietary corporate data on their mobile devices.

Is wireless [Wi-Fi-based] VoIP worth the bother?

Judging from the market, where enterprises vote with their dollars, the answer so far is, “Generally, no” at least for large-scale deployments.

There are exceptions, though rare, and they tend to prove the rule. One of the most often cited is Osaka Gas, in Japan. The utility used Meru Networks’ WLAN infrastructure to support 6,000 mobile phones that were equipped with cellular and Wi-Fi network interfaces. The price tag for the whole project: $10 million.

VoIP over Wi-Fi market projections (North America)

2007 2012
VoIP access points for enterprises $442 million $1.75 billion
VoIP wireless LAN switch and mobility controllers $500 million $2.7 billion
VoIP over Wi-Fi handsets (Wi-Fi only) $93 million $600 million
Source: Juniper Research

The reluctance to embrace large-scale wireless VoIP isn’t suprising. Enterprisewide wireline VoIP deployments have only fairly recently found traction, and many of these have been angst-ridden. To be fair, often the angst is created by specific issues or problems at a given enterprise site.

But using a wireless connection in place of a wire adds lots of complexities, solutions to which are only slowly maturing. Access points have to be pervasively distributed to support voice traffic, while radio interference can easily affect voice quality or call sessions. Wireless eavesdropping on unsecured VoIP sessions is another worry for enterprise managers.

And it’s difficult to pinpoint savings, says Forrester’s Chris Silva. “Wireless VoIP has been positioned as a way to replace cellular minutes of use,” he says. “But corporate IT doesn’t have a good handle on what they’re actually spending on this: It’s often just expensed. So it’s hard to make a case for savings and hard therefore to make a case for investing in VoIP over WLAN.”

Over the course of three months we tested WLAN switches and access points from Aruba Wireless Networks, Chantry Networks (now Siemens), Cisco and Colubris Networks in terms of audio quality QoS enforcement, roaming capabilities, and system features.

Among his findings:

* With QoS enforcement turned on, and with only voice traffic on the net, calls nearly matched toll-quality audio.

* With even a small amount of data traffic, dropped calls became common and audio quality was poor, even with QoS still enabled.

* Roaming from one access point to another either failed or took so long, from 0.5 to 10 seconds, that calls dropped.

Those findings reflect some of the experience at Dartmouth College, which embraced a limited VoIP deployment on its pervasive Aruba-based campus wireless LAN four years ago. Initially, some college staff used the wearable mobile VoIP phone from Vocera. There were some problems with roaming, according to David Bucciero, Dartmouth director of technical services, who despite these teething pains is one who says wireless VoIP is worth the hassle.

More recently, the college has added just under 100 Cisco 7920 wireless VoIP handsets which “were flawless,” though latency was an issue early in the deployment, says Bucciero. Reducing those delays has been an ongoing tuning process, working closely with both Aruba and Cisco, the wireline net vendor for the college.

Things have changed in two years, including the advent of the 802.11e QoS standard, augmented by continued proprietary QoS tweaks, and faster handoffs between access points.

But the real change has been the growing interest in, and products for, shifting call sessions automatically between cellular and Wi-Fi nets. At the enterprise level, this convergence entails an IP PBX, usually a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) server, the WLAN infrastructure, new specialized servers from start-ups like Divitas and established players like Siemens, and accompanying client code running on so-called dual-mode handsets, which have both a cellular and a Wi-Fi radio.

Dartmouth is doing exactly this, running a pilot test with the Nokia E61i, a dual-mode mobile phone recently introduced in the United States as part of its convergence partnership with Cisco. The handsets use SIP to talk to the Cisco CallManager IP PBX.

“Cellular and Wi-Fi convergence is the real pull for VoIP over wireless LANS,” says Farpoint’s Mathias. “Once that [convergence] happens, then we can converge dialing directories, voice mail, other services, and have one phone that works everywhere.”

Will my organization need to change to support enterprise mobility?

Yes.

A growing number of companies are moving beyond or even ignoring mobile e-mail in favor of mobilizing line-of-business applications.

“When you start rolling out these applications over a wider expanse, the questions become ‘how can I lower costs of existing operations’ or ‘how can I provide new opportunities to grow revenue,’” says Bob Egan, chief analyst with TowerGroup, a Needham, Mass., consulting company. “These questions force you into thinking in a strategic mode versus an ad hoc mode.”

In a 2006 TechRepublic survey, 370 U.S. IT and business professionals said they were targeting the following applications for mobilization (respondents could pick more than one answer): intranet access (chosen by 23%), field service/data entry/data collection (21%), personal information management (19%), customer relationship management or sales force automation (16%), supply chain management (12%), and ERP (nearly 10%).

The justification for making these applications mobile is increased worker productivity and efficiency, which was cited as “extremely significant” by 35% of the same respondents. The two other top justifications (“extremely significant”) were reduced costs, cited by nearly 30%, and improved data collection and accuracy, cited by 28%. In all three cases, larger percentages cited these justifications as “significant.”

Successfully exploiting such applications and achieving these goals requires changes in such diverse areas as employee and manager responsibilities and accountability, network access and authentication, mobile device management, end user and wireless networking tech support, and security and data-protection policies and enforcement.

“If you don’t actively manage [mobile] workforce issues, including human resources and psychological issues as well as technology, you don’t get the full value,” says John Girard, vice president for Gartner. “In the end, the most important parts are the human parts: How do you monitor work, how do you assign responsibility, and do you understand what your team is doing?”

To make this possible, Gartner recommends consolidating an array of mobile provisioning, management and security functions (such as vulnerability assessment, security configuration, standard software image control, security and performance monitoring), shifting routine functions from the security group to the operations group, and forging joint policy development between those groups. One goal of this approach is to minimize the number of individual software products that target subsets of mobility issues but can’t share information and aren’t part of a strategic mobility plan.

“If you have different policies for different platforms [desktops, notebooks, smartphones], how do you maintain consistency?” Girard asks. “Most companies have a software distribution plan that works well for the desktop but less well for notebooks, and even less well for smartphones.” Or a well-developed method for backing up desktop PCs may ignore mobile devices completely, despite the growing amount of corporate data on them and the greater likelihood of loss, theft or hacks.

“[Organizational changes] are all about controlling the flow of the company’s intellectual property – how to provision and protect the data on the net and on the devices - and all the responsibilities that go along with that,” says TowerGroup’s Bob Egan.
Mobility becomes a system, or a system of systems that has to be viewed and treated as a whole. “With more and more users being mobile every day, we are paying a lot of attention not only to the uptime but also to the health of the system,” says Daver Malik, telecom engineer at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. “Careful watch on the system usage, capacity and trends is kept so as to prevent any undue disruption to the users.”

One related aspect in preventing undue user disruption is tech support and the enterprise help desk. “Very few companies do a good job in supporting mobile workers,” says Jack Gold, principal of J. Gold Associates. “Their support infrastructure today is for desktop support: You can’t send a technician into the field to fix a [mobile] problem.” The tech support team needs new training, new tools, new policies and procedures to be able to effectively and quickly respond to mobility problems.

One emerging alternative is to outsource some or all of these tasks to a new breed of managed services supplier. One example is Movero Technology, an Austin company that handles all aspects of cellular-based device and application deployments for an enterprise.

How do I control costs in an expanding mobile and wireless environment?

Get a grip.

There are lots of costs in mobility: wireless and wired infrastructures; cellular voice and data plans, including roaming charges; the usage patterns of those plans; mobile device purchases; applications; software for device management; training; tech support.

“Viewing this from a strategic perspective means these costs become more visible,” says TowerGroup’s Egan. A strategic mobility plan for the enterprise uncovers, identifies and quantifies the true costs of the typical piecemeal approach to enterprise mobility, and creates the possibility for systematically controlling and minimizing them, he says.

This can be a shock to organizations that have handled mobility in an ad hoc way, Egan says. “Viewed from a strategic viewpoint, costs become more visible, so it seems like they’re much greater,” he says. “But the ad hoc approach to mobility hid the real costs, and those costs are much greater in my view than they are for a strategic approach.”

A strategic plan can also make more visible the potential benefits of mobility, in terms of saving money or increasing revenues, an essential element in evaluating the needed investments.

Egan says one of his biggest surprises was talking with auto rental giant Avis, which was one of the first to have employees equipped with wireless handhelds, to meet customers in the parking lot as they returned their automobiles. “I said ‘what a great thing for customer service,’” Egan says. “The Avis guy started laughing.” The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. The real benefit of the system was that it let Avis make an instant, on-the-spot decision about whether to keep the car for servicing, which costs money, or send it to auction. It was about where not to spend Avis’ cash.

With a strategic plan, centralized and standardized device and software purchases are possible, a key element in rationalizing and reducing mobility costs. At the same time, changes in network infrastructure and in business processes can be budgeted and planned for. A mobile deployment can be frustrating and investments wasted if, say, an increase in data or transactions overwhelms back-end systems.

“Utilize your fixed infrastructure to its maximum potential to support the expanding wireless/mobile environment,” says Hartsfield-Jackson Airport’s Malik. “A carefully developed plan for the fixed portion of the network (for example fiber) that is capable of supporting future expansions both in terms of size and technology is the key component of controlling the cost related to such expansions, as and when they happen.”

Acquisition costs have to be managed for mobility just as they are for corporate desktops. “It’s very important to know the costs and ownership implications of everything you buy [for a mobile deployment],” says Gartner’s Girard. “Figure out what platforms you’re willing to support, and provide business groups and users the incentives for adopting those.”

Girard recommends a thorough inventory of the relevant tools, systems and services you already have, including software licenses. “Where have you already spent money?” he says. “Then apply Occam’s Razor, simplify. Ask yourself, ‘How do I reach fewer products, both to reduce complexity and reduce costs?’”

A hidden element in cost calculations, according to Venture Development Corp. (VDC), is the impact of downtime and tech support if the mobile device, or some other part of the mobile system, fails. In an October 2006 report, VDC estimated that the failure rates of some consumer-grade mobile devices can exceed 20% per month. “In fact, the overall cost of downtime/lost productivity can represent up to 30% of the TCO (total cost of ownership) of a mobile device,” according to the report.

VDC notes that device vendors are introducing new features and technologies to boost the durability and ruggedness of laptops and other handhelds. This class includes the semi-rugged laptops, which can endure a lot more rough handling and accidents than their consumer-grade cousins, even though they can’t match the military-grade devices designed for the harshest conditions. The higher initial capital cost for such devices is worth it, because the company avoids the much higher costs of downtime due to equipment failures.

A strategic plan makes it possible to negotiate more aggressively with wireless carriers, refining cellular data plans tuned for various groups of users, minimizing overage charges in terms of rates and shared minutes or megabytes, and keeping international roaming charges in check, says consultant Jack Gold.

What can I do to stop wireless denial-of-service attacks?

Not much.

There are two kinds of DoS attacks emerging. One uses radio waves to jam a wireless LAN (WLAN) access point or network access card. The other, more sophisticated, manipulates the 802.11n protocols to accomplish the same thing – blocking a radio from sending or receiving.

A good example of jamming, though it’s unintentional, is caused by the microwave trucks used by TV stations covering the Boston Red Sox home games at Fenway Park. In some cases, the tightly focused beams are not a problem for the baseball park’s unlicensed band 802.11 WLAN because they’re aimed away from the park to one of several towers. But in one case, the beam shot across the park, bounced off a bank of newly installed metal bleachers, and reflected back into the park, wiping out the WLAN.

Red Sox IT Director Steve Conley says he could stand right next to a WLAN access point with a wireless notebook and still not be able to connect to it.

Few homemade or commercial jammers come with the power of these commercial microwave systems. But for short distances, they don’t need a lot. Products available include a $400 pocket-sized jammer that can disrupt three frequencies, including 2.4 GHz, up to 90 feet. It’s advertised as a way to disable “spy cameras” running on wireless links. Another palm-sized model with a range of about 30 feet costs about $290.

There’s even the Wi-Fi Hog project, complete with its own philosophical justification for “liberating” public wireless nets from the concept of shared use. The Hog, mounted on a notebook PC, uses selective jamming to lock out other clients from an access point and stake an exclusive claim on its use.

But a recent article on the Web site of the Instrumentation, Systems and Automation Society, a nonprofit professional group focusing in industrial automation, puts the jamming threat into perspective. The article, by Richard Caro, chief executive of CMS Associates, lays out several reasons why jamming is not as easy to pull off effectively as some claim and others fear.

(Caro mentions that the tactic of battlefield radio jamming by German forces in World War II led to the invention of frequency hopping spread spectrum communications as a countermeasure, an innovation patented by Hungarian-born Hollywood actor Hedy Lamarr and her associate George Antheil.)

“Interference is definitely an issue,” says Farpoint Group’s Craig Mathias. “We were able to construct some bad interference scenarios and show their impact. It was quite interesting to see how much damage could be done.”

“You’re toast,” says Winn Schwartau, of The Security Awareness Company, who wrote about the threat in his 2000 book CyberShock.

Currently, there’s no real countermeasure for a deliberate, focused jamming attack, except to quickly detect it, with a tool like Cognio Spectrum Analyzer, which Cisco is offering as part of its wireless LAN management tool set. Once it’s located, you can use “crowbar remediation, to beat the crap out of it,” says Mathias.

Less amenable to crowbars is the second type of DoS attack, the abuse of the 802.11 media access control (MAC) layer protocols by creating changes in drivers or firmware. “It causes the network card to misbehave with respect to the MAC protocols,” says David Kotz, professor of computer science at Dartmouth College, where this is one of the areas under study by Kotz’s MAP Project (for measure, analyze, and protect), a joint effort with Aruba Networks. “Because the card isn’t being ‘fair’ in following the rules, it makes the net unusable to others.”

One example would be to send de-authentication frames to a specific client, or broadcast them to all the clients, of a given access point. Obediently, the clients will disconnect from the access point. “Now most of them re-authenticate right away,” Kotz says. “But if the attack repeats, you’re getting these interruptions on your [Wi-Fi] phone or video stream.”

For now, the response is the same as for jamming attacks: detect the problem as quickly as possible, find the offender as quickly as possible, and send in “police with guns,” says Kotz.

“But fundamentally, the long-term solution is to fix the protocol itself,” he says.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...questions.html





Yer OUT!

Courier-Journal Reporter Ejected From U of L Game

Bennett removed for blogging super-regional
Rick Bozich

A Courier-Journal sports reporter had his media credential revoked and was ordered to leave the press box during the NCAA baseball super-regional yesterday because of what the NCAA alleged was a violation of its policies prohibiting live Internet updates from its championship events.

Gene McArtor, a representative of the NCAA baseball committee, approached C-J staffer Brian Bennett at the University of Louisville's Jim Patterson Stadium in the bottom of the fifth inning in the U of L-Oklahoma State game. McArtor told him that blogging from an NCAA championship event "is against NCAA policies. We're revoking the credential and need to ask you to leave the stadium."

Courier-Journal executive editor Bennie L. Ivory challenged the NCAA's action last night and said the newspaper would consider an official response.

"It's clearly a First Amendment issue," Ivory said. "This is part of the evolution of how we present the news to our readers. It's what we did during the Orange Bowl. It's what we did during the NCAA basketball tournament. It's what we do."

U of L circulated a memo on the issue from Jeramy Michiaels, the NCAA's manager of broadcasting, before Friday's first super-regional game. It said blogs are considered a "live representation of the game" and that any blog containing action photos or game reports would be prohibited.

"In essence, no blog entries are permitted between the first pitch and the final out of each game," the memo said.

Bennett had filed Internet reports from U of L's NCAA Tournament games at the Columbia (Mo.) Regional and did so from the first two games of the super-regional.

He was told before yesterday's game by U of L assistant sports information director Sean Moth that he was violating NCAA policy by filing periodic reports for The Courier-Journal's Web site, courier-journal.com.

After consulting with his editors, Bennett filed a report at 4:12 p.m. after the top of the first inning and added 15 more reports before he was asked to leave. U of L won 20-2 to advance to the College World Series in Omaha, Neb.

"It's a real question that we're being deprived of our right to report within the First Amendment from a public facility," said Jon L. Fleischaker, the newspaper's attorney.

"Once a player hits a home run, that's a fact. It's on TV. Everybody sees it. (The NCAA) can't copyright that fact. The blog wasn't a simulcast or a recreation of the game. It was an analysis."

During the middle of yesterday's game, Courier-Journal representatives were told by two members of the U of L athletic staff that if the school did not revoke Bennett's credential it would jeopardize the school's chances of hosting another NCAA baseball event.

"If that's true, that's nothing short of extortion and thuggery," Ivory said. "We will be talking to our attorneys (today) to see where we go from here."

Said U of L athletic director Tom Jurich: "As an NCAA institution, we must abide by all NCAA rules, including those in hosting NCAA events. Our staff sought an amicable solution to this situation from many angles.

"It's unfortunate that it led to the actions that were taken. This is not an issue that should mar the most fantastic day for college baseball in this state."

McArtor said he did not "think it serves any purpose" to answer questions and declined further comment.

U of L's associate athletic director for media relations, Kenny Klein, referred questions to Michiaels, who did not return a telephone call yesterday.
http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/...=2007706110450





Firms Tidy Up Clients' Bad Online Reputations
Andrew LaVallee

• The News: Reputation-management services are trying to help clients downplay or remove negative Web information, in exchange for fees that can add up to hundreds of dollars.

• The Background: With employers increasingly checking Google, MySpace and other sites for information on prospective hires, people are becoming more concerned with how and where they appear in Web searches.

• The Pitfalls: Some targeted Web sites, which are protected by the First Amendment, have chosen to deny or mock requests to remove negative information, earning it even wider attention. Also, the reputation-management services are fighting a tide of Web sites that encourage users to offer opinions about other people.

As she puts it, Christina Parascandola has the bad luck of having an unusual name.

The 37-year-old attorney was mentioned in news reports and blog posts about a heated dispute between residents of her Washington neighborhood and a noisy local bar that hosted some gay-themed events. Ms. Parascandola was worried that she came across in the articles as homophobic, particularly to potential employers.

"When you Google my name, it looks like I'm some kind of monster," she says.

Ms. Parascandola set out to minimize the bad publicity. She hired a company called ReputationDefender Inc. that promises to help individuals "search and destroy" negative information about them on the Internet. Businesses and others have long employed so-called search-engine-optimization techniques to try to make themselves appear higher in Web-search results. Now services like ReputationDefender and DefendMyName are charging fees that can run into hundreds of dollars to help clients remove or downplay unflattering online information.

The companies cite success stories of customers who have buried snippy blog comments, embarrassing photos or critical mentions of their names. But, as Ms. Parascandola found out, the services can't wipe everything off the Internet, and their efforts can backfire. ReputationDefender sent a letter to political blog Positive Liberty asking it to remove Ms. Parascandola's name from a critical entry on the grounds the post was "outdated and invasive." Blogger Jason Kuznicki refused, and posted a new entry mocking the request. He says he "had a good laugh over it."

Michael Fertik, a 28-year-old Harvard Law graduate who founded ReputationDefender in October, said misfires represent a "tiny percentage" of the company's efforts to fight the "permanent and public" nature of negative online content. For fees starting at $10 a month, the 10-person Louisville, Ky.-based company scours blogs, photo-sharing sites and social networks for information about a client, then charges $30 for each item the user instructs it to try to correct or remove. The service won't say how many customers it has.

He declined to say how many times ReputationDefender has succeeded in having content removed. He cited recent examples including a man whose ex-lover posted revealing photos to a Web site; an identity-theft victim who had his personal information published on a blog and a medical student who had discussed his own clinical depression in an old newsgroup that he didn't know was public. Mr. Fertik declined to identify those clients.

Janel Lee, a mortgage loan closer in Minong, Wis., sought ReputationDefender out after her ex-boyfriend began posting her work and cellphone numbers in response to several questions on Yahoo Answers, including "What is 50 Cent's phone number?"

She got 15 to 20 calls a day, sometimes as late as 3 a.m. One after-hours voicemail, presumably intended for the rapper, was a lengthy rap performance. "I sing blues, jazz and rock. This was painful," said Ms. Lee.

Ms. Lee said she contacted Yahoo Inc. directly but was unable to get most of the information taken down. So she paid ReputationDefender about $240 for a two-year membership, plus about $150 for the posts that the company, over three months, got removed. "It was quite a great relief knowing that someone was working on it for me," she said. Mr. Fertik said Yahoo removed the information after being contacted by ReputationDefender.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said the company doesn't discuss individual customer-care cases, but that if someone's contact information is posted on Yahoo Answers without approval, the site will remove it.

ReputationDefender begins by sending emails on behalf of its clients to Web-site owners. The letters typically introduce the company, identify the client and the offending content, and ask the recipient to remove it. The letters don't make threats -- Mr. Fertik, despite his training, and others at ReputationDefender aren't lawyers -- but instead try to appeal to recipients' sense of fairness: "Like our clients, and perhaps like you, we think the Internet is sometimes unnecessarily hurtful to the privacy and reputations of everyday people," one such letter reads.

"The first thing we do is we just ask, very politely," said Mr. Fertik. "Thereafter, we can get less polite," including contacting a site's Internet service provider to complain about the site. When Web site owners don't respond to its letters, ReputationDefender sometimes suggests that clients hire a lawyer, though Mr. Fertik said that happens infrequently.

Mr. Kuznicki, the blogger, said he refused to take down the information about Ms. Parascandola because he merely included published information and expressed personal opinions. "I was surprised to get a notice like this, because I don't run an unprofessional or defamatory blog," said Mr. Kuznicki, a Bowie, Md., policy researcher for a think tank.

Ms. Parascandola criticized ReputationDefender for sending a letter directly to someone who had already written critical things of her -- an approach she considered clumsy. "I certainly would not have authorized that," she said. Mr. Fertik said he apologized to Ms. Parascandola and refunded her fees.

While Mr. Fertik said such problems are rare, takedown attempts that go awry can generate considerable unwanted attention. Stuart Neilson, a statistics instructor at a university in Cork, Ireland, claimed on his personal Web site that he was the victim of "academic bullying" by a colleague. After the other professor hired ReputationDefender to try to have the accusations removed, Dr. Neilson rebuffed the firm and posted his exchanges with the company on his site. Those posts received wider attention when they were republished on a blog devoted to faculty discord in academia. "It has merely generated additional publicity," he said.

ReputationDefender also sent a takedown request to Consumerist, a Gawker Media blog that had written about a man who was briefly jailed for harassment after repeatedly calling online travel agent Priceline.com Inc. for a refund. The letter asked the blog to remove or alter the archived post, saying it was "outdated and disturbing" to its client. Consumerist editor Ben Popken blasted the request with a profanely titled entry, calling it an attempt at censorship. "It's not like we're spreading libel," he said. "They were trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube."

ReputationDefender's Mr. Fertik said the company is no longer sending letters to irreverent blogs like Consumerist, which may be more likely to mock the company's efforts. "We are no longer taking those kinds of risks with those kinds of outlets," he said.

DefendMyName, a two-year-old unit of Portland, Maine-based marketing firm QED Media Group LLC, markets itself as a way to remove negative mentions from search-engine results. What it actually does, said founder Rob Russo, is attempt to bury them below promotional sites, blogs and forum postings it creates for clients. The company's rates start at $1,000 a month, he said, though he declined to say how many clients it has.

Adding positive content to combat negative mentions isn't against Google Inc.'s rules, a company spokeswoman said, as long as the content is original and the companies don't use manipulative techniques to push pages higher in search results. She declined to comment on individual reputation companies.

Chris Dellarocas, a University of Maryland associate professor who studies how reputations are built online, said the services are fighting a growing trend of sites that let users recommend, rank and opine on other people, from RateMyProfessor to Rapleaf, a site for people to rate each other after business transactions.

Reputation-management companies "have a place in this new ecosystem, but a limited one," he said. "Let's not forget that all of these mediums are protected by the First Amendment," he added. "The question is, what is defamation and what is a genuinely deserved negative comment?"
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118169502070033315.html





Dell Demands Takedown Of Our "22 Confessions Of A Former Dell Sales Manager"

from Tracy Holland
to ben@consumerist.com
date Jun 14, 2007 4:39 PM
subject Posting by former Dell employee

Dear Ben,

Please remove the posting located at the following link:

http://consumerist.com/consumer/insi...ger-268831.php

It contains information that is confidential and proprietary to Dell.

While not all aspects of the entry are accurate, ostensibly an ex-employee posted Dell's confidential information in violation of his or her employment agreement and confidentiality obligations (which prohibit the disclosure of such information both during and after the period of employment).

We would appreciate your prompt attention to this matter. Please confirm that the posting has been removed by the end of the day tomorrow.

Thank you, and please give me a call if you would like to discuss further.

Tracy Holland

---

Tracy J. Holland
Counsel
Dell Inc.
from Ben Popken to Tracy Holland cc Gaby date Jun 15, 2007 12:58 AM subject Re: Posting by former Dell employee

Tracy,

I am forwarding your request to our legal counsel, who will communicate with you from here on.

- Ben

---

from Tracy Holland
to ben@consumerist.com
cc Gaby
date Jun 15, 2007 1:50 AM
subject RE: Posting by former Dell employee

Thank you. Note, though, it has been almost nine hours since we made the request, yet the posting is still up, with the number of hits growing logarithmically.

Also note, we do not make these requests often (as I'm sure you know, there are thousands of blogs and other online postings that relate to Dell and its products), and we do not make them without good cause. Therefore, while we wait to discuss this request with counsel (despite the source and the clearly confidential and proprietary nature of the information), we ask that you act in good faith to minimize the potential damage caused by this disclosure, and take down the posting immediately. Dell will not regard any such immediate action as an agreement regarding the merits of the request, or as an admission of any liability on the part of consumerist.com or any related person or entity.

If after any necessary discussion between counsel we cannot agree that this was indeed the appropriate course of action, you can always re-post the item.

Thank you,

Tracy Holland

---

from Gaby
to Tracy Holland
cc Ben Popken
date Jun 15, 2007 7:33 AM
subject Re: Posting by former Dell employee

Dear Ms. Holland,

Despite some suggestions to the contrary among some of our fellow beings, most humans need to sleep. Some of us also receive hundreds of emails a day and have to deal with every one of them. I received this email at 12am last night. It is 7am now. That's a pretty good turnaround.

Nonetheless, that's immaterial to the matter in hand. I've reviewed the post, and it appears to me that it is valid, useful and apparently overwhelmingly accurate. It's not bitter, angry or destructive. It is quite simply good and useful information for consumers. And it appears that a Dell rep has already provided updates to various sections, which we have published, which, since they have only corrected certain parts of this report, implies that the uncorrected parts must be true. If that's not the case, please feel free to send us more clarifications and we will update the post further with your additional notes.

We came by this material entirely legally: we were provided it by a third party voluntarily, we did not use any improper means to solicit any Dell employee to breach any agreement he may have had with you. Therefore, we do not believe we are in breach of any law in reporting on this material and, as such, cannot comply with your demands.

In addition, as I am sure you must realise - and there is certainly a history of this with Dell already - consumers tend to react far better when a company responds collaboratively to criticism, than when they act heavy-handedly or dismissively. Removing this story would be far far more damaging to Dell, I assure you, than responding to it on the Dell blog or elsewhere, since in telling our readers that Dell shut down our reporting, we would unleash a chaos of fury and acres of criticism in the press. Forget any legal position you may want to take, meritorious or not, I am deadly serious when I say that I simply cannot recommend this as a course of action. I've seen it happen before and it is really not pretty and I have no doubt that you will regret it.

Of course, it is your decision whether you want to pursue this matter, but I advise you to talk to the team that had to deal with the falllout from the Jeff Jarvis affair before you decide to try and silence your critics. Work for the customer, not against them.

Best regards,

Gaby

http://consumerist.com/consumer/back...ger-269127.php





IFPI Board Member Threatens University Lecturer Over RIAA Criticism
enigmax

Andrew Dubber is the Degree Leader for Music Industries at UCE Birmingham, in the UK. His blog has carried some criticism of the RIAA in the past, just as many sites do these days. But when Paul Birch of the IFPI, BPI and Revolver Records read some anti-RIAA comments, it resulted in an amazing exchange of emails between him and Mr Dubber. We have them here.

Article reproduced in full with permission from Andrew Dubber

First a little introduction to Andrew. From his site, NewMusicStrategies.

My name’s Andrew Dubber. I’m the Degree Leader for Music Industries at UCE Birmingham, UK. I’m a senior lecturer and researcher with a particular interest in online music, radio and new media technology.

Originally from the city of Auckland, New Zealand, I’ve been based in the UK these past two and a half years.

My background is in both radio and the music industry, and I’ve written numerous articles, book chapters, and conference presentations about these sorts of new strategies and technologies in both of those sectors.

In the context of a blog about the online music world, I thought you might be interested in an email exchange I’ve had this evening with a board member of both the IFPI and the BPI.

I’ve had an email conversation with Paul Birch of Revolver Records this evening. Rather than comment on it, I’ll just post it here for your information, in full and unedited, with his permission.

_______________________

Andrew

Looking at your site I do think allowing indiscriminate criticism of the RIAA is inappropriate for a Government funded institution.

Paul

_______________________

Hi Paul,

You might be right, but I’m not a government funded institution, and nor do I consider my criticism of the RIAA indiscriminate.

However, if you find something that’s factually incorrect, I’d be more than happy to amend it.

Thanks for checking out the site.

Cheers,

Andrew

_______________________

Let’s talk about it when we next meet-up, as I don’t intend to write a thesis on the subject.

However, I stand by my assertion.

Regards

Paul

_______________________

Fair enough. But if you do happen to stumble across something that you have a particular problem with, if you could point it out to me, that would be most helpful.

Look forward to catching up.

_______________________

Andrew, Well I am in regular contact with the RIAA and both they and the IFPI are subject to hate mail as a consequence of hubcap, our litigation against consumers for illegally downloading our copyrights.

This manifests itself into individual members of our RIAA management being singled-out for malicious statements and blogs on the internet. As an example you probably saw the case earlier in the week of a Chinese Laundry in the United States being sued for $54M for loosing a pair of trousers, belonging to a lawyer. If you take a look at the criticism on your blog of the RIAA by one of the contributors, they are engaging in a similar malicious prosecution in the US courts but go further and make a number of assertions through your blog that gives credibility to illegal downloading.

I am not concerned that people decide to take out law-suits against our organisations; we have the resources to deal with that. What does concern me however is the repeating of malicious falsehoods that occur in a number of internet blog, and are re-reported as having validity contribute widely to the assertion that right is on the side of wrong-doing.

You might argue that your professional blog is your opinion alone, however you are interwoven into the views and policy of the University of Central England and I think that puts you in an exposed positon Andrew.

It might not be nice to be sued by the RIAA and potentially put in a position of being made bankrupt; neither is issuing redundancy notices to hard working staff. People don’t have to download; they do however have to work. Consumers that enjoy music have a lot of options and enjoying it free on the radio is at least one of them, with last FM and You Tube there is near on demand service free at the point of use. But stealing isn’t clever, but presumably most people don’t really wish to steal, and only share because it is so easy and seems harmless/victimless. If people need to affirmatively hide their activities, then there is an understanding of wrongdoing. I feel that your blog underpins the misuse of our copyright and attacks our trade associations.

There are very serious allegations made in this anti-RIAA link on your blog, and I don’t think its appropriate that you link to them.

Paul
_______________________

2 questions, then please Paul:

1) Which link?
2) Would you be willing for me to post this email to the blog to present a counterbalance to the anti-RIAA position?
_______________________

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/06/06/
riaa-extortion-and-conspiracy-in-the-same-sentence

Above is the link, I am not sure how I navigated to it from your blog.

I am willing for you to publicise anything I say here, but I think that what is more desirable is to take down links from your site that promote this hatred of the recording Industry, because the assumption is that by linking to them that you support the extreme view heralded. That might be unfair to you by the way as you may or may not hold those views. I can only seek to reason with those views but my argument about biting the hand that feeds it is I feel valid. I respect everyone’s right to dissent but I am anxious that Individual managers within our trade association have the right not to be publicly hounded.

Best wishes

Paul
_______________________

I remember that article. I can see how it would be seen as undesirable PR for the RIAA, but I’m not at all convinced it either represents an extreme view or promotes the hounding of individual managers represented by the recording industry association.

In fact, from my time online reading articles about the music industry, I would say it’s about par for the course. Most independent commentators take the position that the suing of individuals by the RIAA has been a public relations disaster, and that rather than deter illegal activity, they have simply turned the record-buying public against them. If someone is taking a countersuit against the organisation, I’m afraid that’s comment-worthy. As it happens, I think I remember hearing that the case was thrown out, but I’d have to check the facts.

The way I see it is this: what I’m linking to is opinion about a news story. It’s genuine news and it’s legitimate opinion. You may not agree, but I don’t see anything there that warrants a take-down notice.

I would never endorse hate speech or the encouragement of the victimisation of any individual no matter what their job. That link doesn’t even come close to either of those things.

More importantly, as someone who comments about the industry, only linking to items that echo the official position of the major label organisations would pretty much make my site valueless to its readers.

Download Squad, the source of that article, is pretty much uniformly interesting, relevant and linkworthy. I don’t think this was an exception.

But I think it’s important that both sides are put, so I’ll post this email exchange up on the site. If there’s anything else you’d like to say on this, then pop it in a reply to this email, and I’ll leave it at that.

I think it’s great that you’re willing to have this discussion in public. Much appreciated.

_______________________

Andrew

It expresses opinion, it’s not factual. If you persist then I shall make a formal complaint to the University.

Your choice.

Paul

_______________________

The End. Always good to end on a threat, RIAA-style….

The full post and comments can be found here.

Andrew has also kindly given every TorrentFreak reader the chance to download his eBook, The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online.

UPDATE:Seems like Andrew Dubber’s webhost (UKHost4U) has suspended his site. It’s unclear at this stage exactly why.
UPDATE2:Andrew’s site is now operational but clarification on the reason for the take-down is still being sought.
http://torrentfreak.com/ifpi-board-m...iaa-criticism/





Kaplan v. Salahi and the Failures of the Justice System
Yaman Salahi

The judgment is in. What can be said? The courts make mistakes. How else should we explain the pro-slavery Dred Scott decision, or Plessy v. Ferguson, which gave juridical approval to racial segregation?

This case is nowhere near as monumental, damaging, or important. But the courts still made a mistake. The judge that presided over my appeal decided in Lee Kaplan's favor, ruling that I must pay Kaplan $7,500 in damages plus $75 in court fees. The great irony is that this comes on the same day that Kaplan proclaims his support for "freedom of speech" and decries a libel lawsuit against one of his allies.

Here, I will not focus so much on the details of this case, since it is an incredibly complicated matter that I may write about in detail in the future. Suffice it to say I am still 100% certain that I have done nothing wrong on this blog or elsewhere; I do not believe that I have overstepped my bounds, legally, ethically, or morally. On the contrary, I think we have taken exceptional measures to protect Lee Kaplan's welfare and reputation--or what can be salvaged of it, given the damage he has done to it himself. We have always corrected errors when they were pointed out and we have always addressed Kaplan's concerns in good faith, even while he was busy defaming us on his websites or calling the Dean of Students at the University. So, I will focus only on my reaction to this twisted experience.

I have lost almost all faith in the court system and its ability to protect normal citizens from abusive, intimidating, and politically-motivated lawsuits. I am shocked at the ridiculous number of lies that Lee Kaplan has gotten away with presenting to the court. What is clear to me now is that the state of California is in need of some serious reflection on how its small claims court procedures are shaped, and how cases are assigned. In California, there is an anti-SLAPP statute that protects victims of Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, which are usually masked as defamation suits. I fully believe that Lee Kaplan's lawsuit against me was of this nature; however, because he sued me in small claims court, I did not have the protections of the anti-SLAPP statute. I initially did not have the protection of a lawyer, nor did I have the assurances that the trial would be conducted with consistency and integrity, ensuring me my due process rights, because the standards for acceptable evidence are much lower and more informal for small claims court than they are for real courts.

Furthermore, I will never know why I lost the initial hearing, or why I lost the appeal, because small claims judges are not obligated to release written opinions with their rulings. I will also never have recourse to object to the second ruling because small claims cases, when they are appealed, are simply heard before another judge in small claims court. It is more of a re-trial than an appeal. Having exhausted that route, I will never have the opportunity to take this to a real appellate court where my first amendment rights might be protected. Because of all these factors, I believe the burden of proof was put on me, rather than on the plaintiff, because the plaintiff was able to get away with making broad and convoluted accusations that I had to disprove. And, in this intensely complicated ordeal, in which every detail and attention to nuance matter in understanding truly what did or did not happen and in what way it happened, this proved to be a difficult task since a 20-30 minute hearing is simply not enough time to properly treat every issue that is in question.

As you can see, I am incredibly frustrated with this ordeal. I have no illusions about the unimportance of this fringe and unpopular figure, Lee Kaplan, on the activist scene and in the Israeli-Palestine debate in general, or about the waste of time that I feel this website and Lee Kaplan have become. The disgusted reactions I get from people when they are exposed to what Lee Kaplan writes and does are enough to tell me that this blog is not so useful in letting people know about him; for the most part, people are able to judge for themselves.

But, given the real threat that what has happened to me poses to other citizens of California and the United States in general, especially to our first amendment rights, and given the persistence of this problem, I can't simply put the entire matter aside to move on with my life, as much as I would love to. I will continue to criticize Lee Kaplan's writing and "activism," without giving it a central role in my life and in spite of the intimidation I have faced, and will no doubt continue to face. I will do everything in my power to investigate what can be done to reform the system that not only let me go through what I've gone through, but put a stamp of government approval on it all. My first task will be to look at what it takes to remove defamation cases from the jurisdiction of small claims court, as is the norm in many other states around the country. Imagine if every politician or journalist in California who was annoyed by their critics filed an inexpensive $50-75 lawsuit in small claims court, and, apparently, could have a strong chance at winning by dragging people through the court system which can't protect them and instead sanctions those abusive actions in the first place. Those who would suffer are those without the resources to protect themselves--by no means does this category exclude college students.

I have absolutely no doubt that had this lawsuit been filed in a real court, I would have won. I think any sensible person can review some of the filings we presented to the court to reach the same conclusion. If you are interested, I would specifically suggest looking at the SLAPP motion we filed by clicking here. Unfortunately, the judge refused to even consider the motion. Indeed, one individual I know claims that he heard Lee Kaplan explaining that he sued me in small claims court because he was advised that it would not succeed in a real court; he is also reported, by this individual, to have said that in filing this lawsuit he simply wanted to "shut him [me] up." I cannot confirm if these statements are accurate or true, given that I did not witness them; however, given the pattern of Lee Kaplan's interactions with me and this website, I do not think that they are improbable. In any case, even if the words did not come from his mouth, I think they accurately describe the nature of his lawsuit.

As for what I will do next with regards to this case, the simple answer is that I don't know. There is nothing stipulating that this website be removed, or that I cease to write about Lee Kaplan. There is nothing even suggesting that anything on this website was false (I was sued, after all, and at the insistence of Kaplan's lawyer, for tortious business interference, not for anything I had said or written), and as such everything will remain the same. Despite this, I hope that sufficient attention is paid to the great danger that what has happened to me poses to all of us. It is by all means a serious issue. My first amendment rights have been subverted with support from the courts, which only shows that everybody is in danger of facing these abusive small claims court defamation suits. My speech has been punished by a ruling with no opinion explaining why or advising me what not to do in the future. My credibility has been tarnished by a trial with incredibly low standards for admissible evidence and a messy, inconsistent court procedure. And, for me, worst of all: I will never know what element of Kaplan's claim, if any, the judge agreed with, though Kaplan will certainly continue to claim that all of them were accepted, though he knows well that this is not the case. Kaplan's lawyer even admitted that Kaplan was a public figure, meaning that he has to prove a statement I made was knowingly false or made in reckless disregard of the truth. He did not fulfill this requirement.

Furthermore, I wanted to make a special point about the following. I have no doubt that the subject matter of my writing, in addition to the plaintiff's enormous ego, had a prominent role in attracting this lawsuit. If I had been writing about pesticides, corn fields, and organic foods, this probably would not have happened the way it did. It is the very sensitivity of issues surrounding the brutality of Israel's apartheid occupation against the Palestinian people along with the incredible silence around this issue in the halls of Congress and the mainstream media that made me a vulnerable figure. However, it is because this silence is imposed, and now endorsed by a judge, that we must continue to speak out on behalf of the Palestinian people, despite the lowly tactics that those who oppose justice and support apartheid have resorted to. I will not stop my work in this regard, and I hope that others will not be intimidated by this audacious effort to chill political speech.

I believe that this case was lost not because Kaplan has any actionable claims, or because I have done anything wrong, but because of shortcomings ingrained into how the small claims court functions. I have been dealt an unjust hand and will continue to explore the options available to me. In the meantime, this website will remain here. If you or anybody you know has any advice, please do not hesitate to contact me at ysalahi@gmail.com.

I would also like to add that if you or anybody you know is ever sued by Lee Kaplan or his questionable affiliates, you should contact a lawyer immediately to explore any and all available options. The earlier the better. Some ideas you might want to look into: (1) countersuing in an amount that is sufficient enough to move the case out of small claims court (greater than $7,500 in California) and/or (2) removing the case to federal court on the grounds of a first-amendment defense.

While I want to thank the many friends, relatives, professors, and mentors who have shown their invaluable support for me in this ordeal, I want to especially thank my excellent lawyer, Adam Gutride, without whose generous moral and legal support I would not have been able to get through the past few months. He put himself at great risk by defending me and, despite this, he insisted on taking the case and invested many hours and much effort into it. His actions are courageous and commendable, and I will never be able to thank him enough for his support.
http://kaplanwatch.blogspot.com/2007...f-justice.html





How Victim Snared ID Thief

She chased down woman who had given her 6 months of hell
Mike Weiss

If it hadn't been for the distinctive suede coat, there would have been no chase through the streets of San Francisco, no heroine and, in all likelihood, no justice. But when Karen Lodrick turned away from ordering her latte at the Starbucks at Church and Market streets, there it was, slung over the arm of the woman behind her.

It was, Lodrick thought, a "beaucoup expensive" light-brown suede coat with faux fur trim at the collar, cuffs and down the middle.

The only other time Lodrick, a 41-year-old creative consultant, had seen that particular coat was on a security camera photo that her bank, Wells Fargo, showed her of the woman who had stolen her identity. The photo was taken as the thief was looting Lodrick's checking account.

Now, here was the coat again. This woman -- a big woman, about 5 feet 10, maybe 150 pounds -- had to be the person who had put her through six months of hell and cost her $30,000 in lost business as she tried to untangle the never-ending mess with banks and credit agencies.

According to Javelin Strategy and Research, a Pleasanton firm that conducts an annual identity fraud survey, there were 8.4 million victims of identity fraud in 2006. But both a spokesman from Javelin and an agent who tracks identity theft for the Federal Trade Commission said they had never heard a story like Lodrick's. One irony, and there were many -- for instance, the woman posing as Karen Lodrick also had ordered a latte -- was that Lodrick was waiting at Starbucks on the morning of April 24 for the bank next door to open so she could pick up "her" driver's license. The bank had called to say it had been left there, but Lodrick had never been in that branch.

Lodrick's heart was pounding. Despite the expensive coat, the Prada bag, the glitter-frame Gucci glasses, there was something not right about the impostor she would later learn was named Maria Nelson.

"She had bad teeth and looked like she hadn't bathed," the onetime standup comic recalled recently. "I thought, 'You're buying Prada on my dime. Go get your teeth fixed.' "

When Nelson got up to leave, Lodrick, who is 5 feet 2 and 110 pounds but comes from what she calls "a fighting family," made an instant decision. First she called 911. Then she followed Nelson down Market Street.

The foot chase was on.

Nelson turned up Buchanan Street in front of the new San Francisco Mint with Lodrick after her. Lodrick felt an almost otherwordly calm and was entirely focused on not losing sight of this person who had made her feel so unsafe. Meanwhile, she was giving the 911 operator a play-by-play on her cell phone.

But as Lodrick turned the corner at the crest of the hill, Nelson was nowhere to be seen. Her heart sank -- until she spotted her skulking in the door well of the Hermann Apartments. They made eye contact, and Nelson fled. Lodrick went after her, glad that she had decided to wear sandals and not the heels she had almost put on.

She didn't really know what she would do if she caught Nelson. "She was a big girl," Lodrick recalled. She told the 911 operator she felt a little scared. The operator said: "If you in any way feel threatened, do not continue the pursuit."

Lodrick told the operator: "No, I'm OK."

Back on Market Street, Nelson hailed a cab. Lodrick ran up to the cabbie: "I have 911 on the line," she told him. "Please don't drive away. I think she's stealing my identity." The driver lifted his hands off the steering wheel in a gesture that said he would stay put. Nelson jumped out of the cab.

"Stop following me," she beseeched Lodrick. "You're scaring me."

"I'm scared, too," Lodrick answered. "Let's just wait for the police, and we can straighten this out."

"I can't," Nelson said. "I'm on probation."

Indeed, court records show that Nelson was on probation for one of eight previous fraud convictions and also had been convicted of theft. Later, the San Francisco police detective who worked the case, Bruce Fairbairn, said Nelson's statement about probation, relayed to the 911 operator by Lodrick, was a key to extracting a guilty plea.

Nelson took off again. In front of West Coast Growers, she dropped a wallet into an abandoned shopping cart. Lodrick, still after her, picked up the wallet -- also Prada -- and found an entire set of identification, including credit cards, a Social Security card and a debit card all in the name of Karen Lodrick. Later, when she returned to the bank that had been her original destination that morning and took possession of the lost driver's license, it was a perfect forgery -- with a hologram and a California seal -- and it had Lodrick's name but Nelson's photo and physical characteristics.

"You can buy the technology (to add marks and holograms) on your computer from companies that have legitimate government contracts and then make a lot of money selling the technology to people they must know are not legitimate," Fairbairn said. "Millions and millions of dollars." The black market, he said, is "a growth industry."

On they went, pursuer and pursued. Onto and off of a bus, onto Franklin Street, up Page Street, around a corner. But as Lodrick turned into the 200 block of Fell Street, she again lost sight of Nelson. A terrible sense of failure overcame her. She ran frantically through a darkened Walgreens parking garage and saw no one, all the time begging the 911 operator to hurry and get her a cop before it was too late.

When Officer Rickey Terrell arrived a moment later -- about 45 minutes after the chase began -- he, too, searched the Walgreens garage. He found Nelson crouched behind a car smoking a cigarette in front of an emergency exit.

A relieved Lodrick laughed out loud, surprising herself. "You idiot," she said to Nelson. "You should have run."

Then she was sick to her stomach.

In November 2006, her postal carrier told Lodrick that master keys to the neighborhood's mailboxes had been stolen. Soon afterward, Wells Fargo informed her that there was suspicious activity in her accounts.

Using the stolen keys, Lodrick believes, Nelson made off with an unsolicited mailing from the bank. Lodrick said it contained two debit/credit cards she had not requested and, worse, a statement for a certificate of deposit that included her Social Security number. Personal identification numbers for the cards were in a separate envelope.

It took only three days for Nelson to raid the accounts for about $9,000 through withdrawals and purchases, bank records show.

Dealing with the consequences of somebody pretending to be her and ringing up purchases of computers, jewelry, clothing, groceries, cigarettes and liquor took a day or two of Lodrick's time every week. There were the credit card companies to hassle with and credit agencies and banks, especially her own bank.

Lodrick calculates that as a self-employed consultant, she lost $30,000 in unearned income between November and Nelson's apprehension in late April. Wells Fargo eventually restored to her accounts all the money Nelson had withdrawn.

But Lodrick, an optimist by nature who normally has a quick and spontaneous laugh, said "the bank was horrible. I felt they thought I was comical. I kept dealing with different people. Three different times they told me I'd have to come in and ID the (security camera) photo, that I hadn't done it."

And there were nightmares. She said she dreamt she was in jail and woke up in a panic. It was clear Nelson had targeted her: Lodrick changed bank accounts and identification numbers, only to find that Nelson had again broken into her mail and stolen the new information and was still after her accounts.

The woman knew where she lived -- Lodrick felt unsafe. What Lodrick didn't know is that they were neighbors, living only three blocks apart.

In the end, that photo of Nelson in her distinctive coat was her undoing. On June 6, she pleaded guilty to one felony count of using another person's identification fraudulently. She was sentenced by Superior Court Judge Harold Kahn to the 44 days she had already served in county jail and three years' probation.

Nelson also was ordered to make restitution in an amount to be determined by the court and to stay away from Lodrick. Those were the terms of a plea bargain negotiated by Assistant District Attorney Reve Bautista with Nelson's public defender, Christopher Hite.

Lodrick, who made a statement at sentencing, was dissatisfied. "I can't believe it," she said. "I went through six months of hell, and she's going to get probation? She was on probation when she victimized me. Obviously, probation's not helping."

Nor did Nelson, 31, appear to be remorseful. When she entered the courtroom in her orange jail jumpsuit and saw Lodrick, she smirked and waved at her. Judge Kahn chastised her for her attitude.

Over the protest of her attorney, the judge also insisted that Nelson undergo psychological counseling in addition to the drug and substance abuse counseling that were part of the plea bargain. Nelson was delivered to the Yolo County sheriff on another outstanding fraud-related warrant after she was sentenced in San Francisco.

One unexpected outcome of having her identity stolen is that Lodrick was invited to become a San Francisco cop by Fairbairn, the inspector who handled the case.

"She's quite the detective," he said. "I was so impressed by her courage, her dogged determination and her savvy that I took her down to recruitment. She has the best natural instincts for a cop I've seen in years."

Lodrick's experience did give her an appetite for fighting crime. But in the end, she decided, "I just don't have the stomach for it."
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...15/IDTHEFT.TMP





New Bill Would Create Family Tier, Extend Indecency Standards to Cable
Eric Bangeman

A new bill introduced into the House of Representatives yesterday would force cable operators to offer a family tier of programming, along with an "opt-out" à la carte cable programming option. At the same time, it would apply broadcast indecency standards that restrict indecent programming to the hours of 10pm and 6am to cable and satellite networks.

The Family and Consumer Choice Act of 2007 is cosponsored by Rep. Daniel Lipinski (D-IL) and Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE) and would be the à la carte law that Federal Communication Commission Chairman Kevin Martin says is necessary. The bill has not yet appeared on the Library of Congress web site, but Ars was able to obtain a copy of the legislation from Rep. Lipinski's office.

Tiers and à la carte

The bill has something for everyone who has been advocating for à la carte cable. Those concerned by the amount of programming available on cable that's inappropriate for young eyes should be pleased, as there's a very real "think of the children" thread running through the bill. "Of those homes with children subscribing to cable service, the vast majority subscribe to expanded basic cable service," notes the bill. For that reason, the bill would mandate the creation of "real family tiers of programming," which the bill defines as all channels in the Expanded Basic Tier aside from those carrying programming rated TV-Mature or TV-14 between the hours of 6am and 10pm.

Those who are a tired of paying for channels that they never watch will like the bill's opt-out provision, which will give cable and satellite subscribers the ability to cancel channels on an individual basis. The legislation says that anyone electing to do so would receive a "credit on the monthly bill... for such blocked channels in an amount equal to the amount that such distributor pays for the right to provide such blocked channel."

That rumbling you're hearing is the heavy-duty lobbying machines of the cable companies being revved up and put into gear. Cable and satellite providers have consistently opposed à la carte programming, saying that it would raise overall programming costs while dooming niche networks that have a limited audience. A couple of cable companies—most notably Time Warner—have created family tiers, but those are the exception, rather than the rule. And despite all the discussion about à la carte cable, consumers are generally indifferent to it and unrealistic about its price.

Applying broadcast standards to cable

Moving beyond à la carte and family tiers, the legislation would extend indecent programming restrictions that are currently applied to terrestrial TV to cable and satellite networks. "In accordance with the indecency and profanity policies and standards applied by the [FCC] to broadcasters, as such policies and standards are modified from time to time, not transmit any material that is indecent or profane on any channel in the expanded basic tier of such distributor" except between 10pm and 6am.

Rep. Lipinski and FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, who has advocated for expanded indecency regulations, believe that parents need government help in protecting their children from objectionable content. "In today's culture, parents are increasingly worried that their children are exposed to obscene, indecent, and violent programming," Rep. Lipinski said in a statement. "While there is no doubt that parents are the first line of defense in protecting their kids, clearly they need more help."

With the parental controls built into every television set, set-top box, and DVR being sold these days, the need for such legislation seems questionable at best. Unlike broadcast television, which is available to anyone with a TV and an antenna, people subscribe to and pay for cable/satellite. Those who are concerned about the possibility of indecent programming during the daytime already have several options available to them, including not subscribing to cable or using some of the technological means available to block objectionable content.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-to-cable.html







Attention, Web Surfers: The Following Film Trailer May Be Racy or Graphic
David M. Halbfinger

Hollywood has been circulating movie trailers on the Web for years, but only now is the film industry retrofitting its rating system to give the studios a chance to showcase their racier material online.

No matter what the rating of the film, nearly all the trailers shown in theaters — and on the Web — have come with a so-called green band, or tag, saying they are approved for all audiences by the Motion Picture Association of America. For movies rated PG-13 or stronger, that often meant watering down the violence, sex, language and overall intensity of a trailer.

But in April a teaser trailer for Rob Zombie’s “Halloween” remake, set for release on Aug. 31, became the first to display a new yellow tag signaling that it was “approved only for age-appropriate Internet users” — defined by the Motion Picture Association as visitors to sites either frequented mainly by grown-ups or accessible only between 9 p.m. and 4 a.m.

And two raunchy comedies — “Knocked Up” and this August’s “Superbad” — are among a spate of recent films with R-rated, “red-tag” Internet trailers, which require viewers to pass an age-verification test, in which viewers 17 and older have to match their names, birthdays and ZIP codes against public records on file.

Together the yellow (for films rated PG-13 and above) and red (R or NC-17) tags amount to a colorful, albeit easily circumvented, attempt to adjust to a fast-changing advertising landscape where Internet audiences can do as much to build or hurt word of mouth as those watching the coming attractions with popcorn in hand.

“We want to protect children,” said Marilyn Gordon, head of the association’s advertising administration. “That is our job. We also want to be able to allow our distributors more flexibility in their marketing materials.”

The spike in red-tag trailers on the Web is a function of the surge in R-rated sex romps following the success of “Wedding Crashers” two summers ago, and the blessing the association gave in March to two companies offering age-verification services, which tap into public-records databases.

R-rated trailers have been permitted for decades, of course, but they all but disappeared from theaters in 2000, when the Federal Trade Commission blasted Hollywood for aiming violent and risqué content at children.

Many theater chains still refuse to run them, lest mistakes in the projection booth offend moviegoers. As a result, major studios like Warner Brothers won’t even make red-tag trailers. Universal Pictures, for one, last ran an R-rated trailer in cinemas in 1999 for “American Pie.”

Still, studio marketing executives acknowledge that they have been pushing the envelope on theatrical trailers — slipping stronger material into previews given green tags — for quite some time, and with the association’s help. They say the association has routinely worked to ensure that such trailers only run ahead of features with appropriately matched content.

A case of that envelope-pushing came in early April, when the Dimension label of the Weinstein Company worked out a deal to advertise “Halloween” as a green-tag teaser trailer ahead of “Grindhouse,” the retro exploitation thriller.

But when that trailer wound up on Yahoo, the film industry association insisted it be pulled. The “Halloween” trailer includes plenty of bare skin, slashing blades and women in peril — hardly worthy of a green tag in the context of a Web portal open to young children. Three days later the same trailer was back on the Web, though not on Yahoo and this time with a yellow tag.

Adam Fogelson, president of marketing at Universal, who pressed the association to adopt the new yellow tag, said he hoped it would be extended to theaters eventually. “There’s got to be something, if we’re being intellectually honest, between a trailer that’s appropriate for ‘Bambi’ and a trailer that would be appropriate to go up with ‘Hostel II,’ ” he said.

At Sony, Dwight Caines, an executive vice president for digital marketing, said yellow tags at least provided a way to show “some of the edgier PG-13 content we could never show before.”

A draft of the association’s guidelines reveals the middle ground it has staked out for yellow tags. Permitted, to name a few, are “some scenes of gunfire”; “some sexuality, some nudity, some less graphic sexual slang”; “some blood, wounds”; and “some limited depictions of minors using illegal drugs.”

Strictly off limits are “excessive scenes of violence or guns/weapons involving minors”; “graphic sexual scenes, including depictions of rape”; “stronger profanity”; and “excessive blood.”

That gunfire, slang and blood come at a price. For the studios’ movie sites, association guidelines limit access to yellow-tag trailers to the hours of 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. For third-party sites, the threshold is that at least 80 percent of users must be 18 and older, according to Nielsen’s Web demographic reports.

Not everyone is thrilled with the tweaks so far. Sanjeev Lamba, executive vice president of marketing at Dimension Films, praised the association for “stepping in to regulate the Internet,” but said the yellow tag for “Halloween” was doing little but “restricting my ability to reach an audience.”

“I can’t get it out in the major portals, and that’s where the major traffic is,” he said.

James Steyer, chief executive of Common Sense Media, which reviews entertainment products for parents, said the yellow-tag Web trailers represented a significant step, for the movie studios and for families. “Trailers have a huge impact,” he said. “The crux of it will be, how good are the safeguards?”

The association says it has asked software companies to improve the restrictions, but so far they are hardly foolproof. Beating the time-of-day limits requires adjusting a computer’s internal clock and time zone. The Nielsen ratings still won’t keep a youngster from Googling his or her way to a trailer on a site mainly frequented by grown-ups.

Even the R-rated, red-tag trailer for “Superbad” doesn’t pose much of a challenge, given that it requires users only to type in an adult’s name, zip code and birthdate to gain access. “It’s really an honor system today,” Mr. Caines of Sony said. Just as under-age moviegoers are expected not to switch auditoriums to R-rated films, he said, “the consumer’s agreeing that they’re being truthful in the process.”

That said, it took only a quick Web search to gain unfettered access to the R-rated “Superbad” and “Knocked Up” trailers at slashfilm.com, owned by Peter Sciretta of San Francisco, who said he was often sent studio-quality copies of trailers from people using Gmail accounts.

Twenty minutes later Mr. Sciretta called back. Sony, alerted by the association, had just asked him to remove the R-rated “Superbad” trailer. “We’ve been the top result on Google for months,” he said, “till the moment that you asked them about it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/movies/13yell.html



















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

June 9th, June 2nd, May 26th, May 19th, May 12th, May 5th

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. Questions or comments? Call 213-814-0165, country code U.S.. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public."
- Hugo Black
JackSpratts is offline   Reply With Quote